1,322 quotes found
“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 want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would ne...”
“...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”
“Write what you know.”
“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”
“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”
“Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.”
“The desire to write grows with writing.”
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”
“There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.”
“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no stor...”
“The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
“A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.”
“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.”
“Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ...”
“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is no...”
“If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and wil...”
“nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.”
