#writing

"Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page."

"Maybe what this is. What we have, is something that will save us from ourselves."

"Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

"The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them."

"88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris."

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination."

"Write what you know."

"Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him."Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded."

"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its"(no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's"(with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill"response in the average stickler."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."

"All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer."