#writing

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it."

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."

"I had a dream about you. You were writing names and numbers in a book, and I asked if that was a phone book or the Book of Life. You answered in a way that blinded me with light, and I grew afraid. So I said, “Hey, what is that over there?” and I pointed over your shoulder, and when you turned to look I scribbled my name on the bottom of page one."

"Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft."

"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."

"Coin a new word and hear it jingle in your pocket with all your other change. My love for you is sofacouchsitsitting, so you’d better buckle up."

"Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story."

"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."

"Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don't keep space in your head for writing, you won't write even if you have the time."

"If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus."

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."

"Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice."

"I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen."