#writing

"Imagination is Everything!"

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

"Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape."

"So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want."

"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."

"Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?"

"A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"The story is always better than your ability to write it."

"Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity."

"It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to."

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."

"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself."

"You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."