1,322 quotes found
“I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.”
“ A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.”
“Only write if you can't not.”
“I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice thro...”
“When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.”
“[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.”
“You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason,...”
“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”
“Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.”
“Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. ...”
“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ”
“The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”
“The greatest writers have persistence.”
“No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.”
“I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.”
“(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our...”
“(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting ...”
“As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the s...”
“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”
“(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.”
