#writing

"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"

"Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin."

"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself."

"We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them."

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."

"If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write."

"The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion."

"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]"

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."

"Early on I set out to write the next Great American Novel, and then later on I set out the silverware and enjoyed my dinner in silence."

"let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences"

"...(W)here there's drama, there's crap."

"I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku."

"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

"Never let negativity derail your journey as a writer. Use the energy for your own betterment."

"Being a writer is a good, good thing."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."Aristotle"

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."