#writing

"Excuse me, I feel interrupted and I think I've overdose from the idea of loving you."

"To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself."

"Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again."

"Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke."

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

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

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."

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

"Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake."

"No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness."

"...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?"

"People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

"I type on my keyboard like I’m Beethoven on the piano. My words may be silent in the air, but they ring as music in my mind while I write."

"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."

"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."