156 quotes found
“Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.”
“...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is lik...”
“The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.”
“It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not...”
“Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.”
“I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pl...”
“Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.”
“More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.”
“Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known whil...”
“But for many writers, and to borrow a popular clich, its like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inn...”
“Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.”
“Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.”
“Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.”
“Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that cant wait to try out their new experiment. ...”
“The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triump...”
“The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.”
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
“A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.”
“Why do I do it to myself? Why don't I get an ordinary job?”
“It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the wo...”
