156 quotes found
“The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.”
“Writing is a little bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Then you do it for money.”
“It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.”
“Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audie...”
“There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.”
“The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.”
“A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent s...”
“I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far.""What stuff is that?" he'd asked her."We're completely at ease being naked in front of strange...”
“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”
“Writing is what happens when the words in your head are overpowered by the words in your heart.”
“Introduction of deus ex machina is a tell-tale sign of sloppy plotting.”
“A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.”
“As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.”
“Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that ...”
“The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will und...”
“If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.”
“Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwind...”
“I dont put that pressure on myself (to write every day), but I do tend to write every day. Its not pressureits pressure release.”
“Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more ...”
“I dont think theres a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And thats what the best writing does, thats what art does. It looks a re...”
