#writing

"Anything we fully do is an alone journey."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

"All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer."

"Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

"But still I feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, "alright sucker, now what?"

"When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again."

"I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been."

"Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it."

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you."

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

"I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh."

"Good fiction creates its own reality."

"I’ve found newspapers only useful as kindling material for campfires. It’s been said that newspaper articles are written at a fifth grade reading level. If so, I can’t figure out why journalists would write something that the average high school senior can’t even read."

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."

"Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer."