#writing

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out."

"I kept loving and loving and loving. Every waking hour, I marveled on how these moments would make made me feel. I wanted to love the world and be the change it so deliciously craved."

"Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell."

"I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."

"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."

"When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book."

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"We are all pencils in the hand of God."

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."

"If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest."

"Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup."

"Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul."

"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now."

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."

"Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels."

"You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."

"If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door."