1,322 quotes found
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no ...”
“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the he...”
“Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.”
“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.”
“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”
“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...”
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”
“You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect t...”
“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere ...”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”
“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many chara...”
“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”
“He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.”
“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the t...”
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I writ...”
