#writing

"If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!"

"Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot."

"I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer."

"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."

"A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow."

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

"فكم من الأشياء قد تحدث لنا بسبب ما نقرأ.ذلك أن ثمة قراءات تفعل بنا فعل الكتابة، وتوصلنا إلى حيث لا نتوقع !"

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."

"He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written."

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

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."

"Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it."

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

"Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon."

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."

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