#writing

"Writing is the voices inside our heads, our minds, the creativity that exists for us to, from nothing, create alternate worlds, manipulate a personality or to introduce a new kind of love, a new kind of hate or pain or happiness or wonder or... anything we want. Through words, we can do, we can be anything we want."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."

"Broken hearts, you can run, you can hide and perhaps the earth is big enough to believe you’re safe. So maybe for a moment you have escaped but hear me, hear me well. Love will find you and it will leave nothing behind."

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."

"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton."

"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

"What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come."

"Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college."

"Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting."

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent."

"You are what you write."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out."

"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."

"Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone."