1,322 quotes found
“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
“Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?~Jack or The Submission”
“Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be pass...”
“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations...”
“Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.”
“Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.”
“There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. ...”
“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”
“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wan...”
“When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathi...”
“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.”
“There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.”
“You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.”
“Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out”
“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water start...”
“A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.”
“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgre...”
“It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?”
“The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of ...”
“Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our ...”
