1,322 quotes found
“Well, I like him. Theres a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?She shrugged. Its entirely up to him.What do you mean? He smiled quizzically at her.Characters talk to you. Trans...”
“It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'...”
“There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.”
“When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross ov...”
“Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us in our own experience. It is a way to move from passive to active. We may still...”
“The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.”
“I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you ci...”
“A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write.”
“Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.”
“He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to ...”
“If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”
“Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a bo...”
“think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying t...”
“Attributing to another author, "Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.”
“Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are jus...”
“Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the Im a Fraud phase. You go through the Ill Never Finish phase. And every once in a while you think, What if I actually h...”
“It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time...”
“Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end....”
“Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.”
“When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.”
