1,322 quotes found
“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonne...”
“Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentenc...”
“You are what you write.”
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
“The story is always better than your ability to write it.”
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are ab...”
“I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.”
“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no o...”
“the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever”
“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one know...”
“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”
“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”
“You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.”
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
“unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it”
“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
“I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. ”
