#writing

"Tweeting is talking into the abyss, filling a void in your life by avoiding real human contact."

"When asked, "How do you write?"I invariably answer, "One word at a time,"and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope."

"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."

"If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you."

"Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure"

"My pen shall heal, not hurt."

"I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read."This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"In Hollywood, no one knows anything."

"If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning..."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."

"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."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."

"When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly."

"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God."

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

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

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."