1,322 quotes found
“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.”
“I write because I cannot NOT write.”
“Even at the timetwenty years oldI said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but ...”
“Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.”
“Writer speaks a stench.”
“Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!”
“I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”
“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and ...”
“How can you write if you can't cry?”
“My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. ”
“I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.”
“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and...”
“I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.”
“When Im writing my own stuff, its like swimming upstream. Or falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.”
“You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?”
“Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfngt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhrt. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.”
“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”
“If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.”
“My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”
“And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--" "It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonder...”
