106 quotes found
“The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.”
“The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer...”
“Books most certainly don't write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.”
“The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.”
“The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, th...”
“A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.”
“A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.”
“Writing, is not a race. Is to distill the soul letter by letter in a slow and delicate process that will take years.”
“What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are y...”
“If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.”
“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden ele...”
“I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!”
“There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revisi...”
“The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelin...”
“He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragra...”
“To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone elses work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make ...”
“Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Diff...”
“To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But ...”
“You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.”
“Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.”
