1,322 quotes found
“I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”
“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?”
“People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged you...”
“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obs...”
“I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.”
“Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this h...”
“The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I...”
“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”
“When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm al...”
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it ...”
“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
“That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to unders...”
“End with an image and don't explain.”
“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”
“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 exp...”
“God pity the poor novelist.”
“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”
“Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”
“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”
