#writing

"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."

"Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning."

"I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled."

"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."

"Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up."

"I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love."

"Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure"

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."

"Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

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

"Why write stories? To join the conversation."

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

"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."

"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."

"Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural."

"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."

"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."