Writing Quotes

What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.

I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.

I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

If there is a book you want to read but isn`t written yet,write it.

If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Writers will happen in the best of families.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

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.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

The desire to write grows with writing.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing.... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the running to spread the truth among such persons.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things"”a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring"”with immense, even startling power.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust, I'll rise.

Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

When One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks, not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Is it snowing where you are? All the world that I see from my tower is draped in white and the flakes are coming down as big as pop-corns. It's late afternoon - the sun is just setting (a cold yellow colour) behind some colder violet hills, and I am up in my window seat using the last light to write to you.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.

If you write, fix pipes, grade papers, lay bricks or drive a taxi - do it with a sense of pride. And do it the best you know how. Be cognizant and sympathetic to the guy alongside, because he wants a place in the sun, too. And always...always look past his color, his creed, his religion and the shape of his ears. Look for the whole person. Judge him as the whole person.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Less is more.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Half my life is an act of revision.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

I don't work at being ordinary.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We've done just what we set out to do. Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers and you.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

"when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence"in love, never settle"value yourself first and this will help you to value others"life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest"everyone in the world is different, and that's ok"

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

I am a drinker with writing problems.

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.

Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed

I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card"¦and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can't forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Write about what you don't know about what you know.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

I usually take a walk after breakfast, write for three hours, have lunch and read in the afternoon. Demons don't like fresh air - they prefer it if you stay in bed with cold feet; for a person who is as chaotic as me, who struggles to be in control, it is an absolute necessity to follow these rules and routines. If I let myself go, nothing will get done.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don't you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

I could never be a country person, sitting around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the middle of society, whether it's growing or crumbling.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours, so many temptations!

It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something,it makes me incapable of doing it. When I believe I can,I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning.'"Mahatma Gandhi

I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.

I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it.

If you would be good, first believe you are bad.

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that's on a good day.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush's dog getting a book deal.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

For me, writing something in the spirit of Halloween is like Mother Teresa writing on charity and sacrifice. It's just second nature to me.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot "“ things are not as they seem.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Don't get it right, just get it written

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

People shout out for songs and I don't even remember writing them.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. "˜Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty...

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes—in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer—you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me—I have no others.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song 'Cow.'

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering—that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.

There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

The main question to a novel is — did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not — story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

The men who make history have not time to write it.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

Almost all words do have colour and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone's eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.

I'll make music, whether or not anyone is listening, for the rest of my life. It's a natural form of expression for me, the same way I draw and write and sing.

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

If I waited for inspiration every time I sat down to write a song I probably would be a plumber today.

You don’t know a woman until you have had a letter from her.

If somebody writes a great poem, people don't run around applauding the pencil, saying 'Oh, what a great pencil'...I'm a pencil in God's hands.

The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Any room where you feel a good vibe is a good place to write.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.

Whether or not you write well, write bravely.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites: The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause"”to look at them and make something of them.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

I lived to write, and wrote to live.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks...Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

It's not how big your pencil is; it's how you write your name.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories likes these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

He wouldn't write a letter because he couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' He's that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

I keep thinking of the gifts of my own upbringing, which I once took for granted: I can read any book I choose and comprehend it. I can write a complete sentence and punctuate it correctly. If I need help, I can call on judges, attorneys, educators, ministers. I wonder what I would be like if I had grown up without such protections and supports. What cracks would have turned up in my character?

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

If I blow my nose, it gets written all over the world.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.

Dip your pen into your arteries and write.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Writing is like praying, because you stop all other activities, descend into silence, and listen patiently to the depths of your soul, waiting for true words to come. When they do, you thank God because you know the words are a gift, and you write them down as honestly and cleanly as you can.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

A man like Verdi must write like Verdi.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.

It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow—or kneel or get knocked down—to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is — and should be — your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

You will achieve grand dream, a day at a time, so set goals for each day - not long and difficult projects, but chores that will take you, step by step, toward your rainbow. Write them down, if you must, but limit your list so that you won't have to drag today's undone matters into tomorrow. Remember that you cannot build your pyramid in twenty-four hours. Be patient. Never allow your day to become so cluttered that you neglect your most important goal - to do the best you can, enjoy this day, and rest satisfied with what you have accomplished.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

I write of the wish that comes true - for some reason, a terrifying concept.

If we write our dreams and goals down, we dramatically increase our odds of realization. If we share them with others, they become potent and alive.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.

Because here's the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

Bad spellers of the world untie!

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn't belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about

...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?

The man who comes to writing late, but is in essence a writer, may sometimes gain as much as he has lost: his experience of life has given him a subject, he is spared the youthful writer's self-torment and soul-searching.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

You don't know me at all. You don't know the first thing about me. You don't know where I'm writing this from. You don't know what I look like. You have no power over me. What do you think I look like? Skinny? Freckles? Wire-rimmed glasses over brown eyes? No, I don't think so. Better look again. Deeper. It's like a kaleidoscope, isn't it? One minute I'm short, the next minute tall, one minute I'm geeky, one minute studly, my shape constantly changes, and the only thing that stays constant is my brown eyes. Watching you.

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

Night time really is the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone is asleep.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

But our wounds are part of who we are...and there is nothing left to chance....And pain's the pen that writes the songs....That call us forth to dance

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

Sometimes I think [my writing] sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book.

For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.

Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.

Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

"ﾂｦI go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket... the least understood and the least noticed

Before the gates of excellence the high gods have placed sweat; long is the road thereto and rough and steep at first; but when the heights are reached, then there is ease, though grievously hard in the winning.

The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

You write a hit the same way you write a flop.

The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve—hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.

Make notes"”I've lost more material than I've ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not still up there in one's brain. It's in outer space and it ain't coming back.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

I stay way from that area, and there's only so many songs you can write about love, sex and death.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization….It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

Behind every specific call, whether it is to teach or preach or write or encourage or comfort, there is a deeper call that gives shape to the first: the call to give ourselves away - the call to die.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

Writing must always have intention because words have power.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world - God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

I don't like writing essays or theory.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

The key to all knowledge comes in words of just one syllable, apparently.... There's only the last page left to write on. I'll fill it with words of just one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.

The basic skills of math, English and writing are not enough, ... You must develop a basic system of values to form and guide the use of these skills. The true test will not be what you learned in college, but how you used what you learned.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

I understand now my father really thought he was doing me good. Education means a lot to Palestinians. We've become some of the most educated people in the world through our diaspora. We've had to be. When you ain't got land, your degree may be your only solid ground. May father felt (feels) that being a doctor would give me security. How can I explain that I'm not safe from anything if I don't write?

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

I really only write about inner landscapes and most people don't see them, because they see practically nothing within, because they think that because it's inside, it's dark, and so they don't see anything. I don't think I've ever yet, in any of my books, described a landscape. There's really nothing of the kind in any of them. I only ever write concepts. And so I'm always referring to "mountains" or "a city" or "streets." But as to how they look: I've never produced a description of a landscape. That's never even interested me.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was.

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

We had just played a sold-out show and it had been a fun night when we heard the news. It brought everything back to reality. He was a brilliant guy. He was an aerospace engineer and an entrepreneur. We were just starting to write new songs two weeks after he died. We were still grieving. So that was naturally a big subject matter for the album.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy — or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others. To develop ‘Hidden Art’ will also, of course, take time and energy – and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.

I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.

If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged.

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I am persecuted because of my writings, I think, therefore, that I should write some more.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. "ﾂ寧oe Bunch

I needed to find my way to write. I need about six hours of uninterrupted time in order to produce about two hours of writing, and when I accepted that and found the way to do it, then I was able to write.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

God is love, but get it in writing.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.

For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.

To tell the truth, I don't read children's books. I'm an adult. I just write them.

Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.

I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

In writing advertising it must always be kept in mind that the customer often knows more about the goods than the advertising writers because they have had experience in buying them...

Look inside yourself and you'll find a world of things (a world of your own experiences)worth writing about.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

You can get stale writing with each other for a while.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

Writing is a voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks our hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - "Well, I'm going to write about a thing.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.

Let there be no inscription upon my tomb. Let no man write my epitaph. No man can write my epitaph. I am here ready to die. I am not allowed to vindicate my character; and when I am prevented from vindicating myself, let no man dare calumniate me. Let my character and motives repose in obscurity and peace, till other times and other men can do them justice.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve"¦something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness "” those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

I just write whenever I can.

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

When a man is proud because he can understand and explain the writings of Chrysippus, say to yourself, 'if Chrysippus had not written obscurely, this man would have had nothing to be proud of.'

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

To simplify complications is the first essential of success.

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.

I lost that excitement I had when I first started out. It was all about the need to just get a job, and so I found the joy again when I was writing Deuce Bigelow. I was laughing so hard and along with my writing partner at the time, simply laughing until we cried.

It certainly made a film writing career for me.

Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.

And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.

Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review, it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism, does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers . . .

You're walking by the tomb of Battiades, Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.

Television has raised writing to a new low.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.

If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Words - as I speak or write them - make a path on which I walk.

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other.

Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

Writing that's not working for a living.

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

I write music with an exclamation point!

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write; but how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me, Excepting Original Sin.

I think it's a terrible thing to write and not enjoy it. It's a sad thing. But of course a lot of people do work because they need to eat. And we all need to eat, but that's not the only reason to work. You couldn't have paid me not to write.

Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

First you write down your goal; your second job is to break down your goal into a series of steps, beginning with steps which are absurdly easy.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

Well, I think every film student goes into film school thinking they want to write and direct their own movies, and they don't realize how much goes into it, and what a process it is.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

I think it's an area that one writes from that is curious because it is not a clearly defined partisan one.

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

I was hooked on writing. I mean, where else can you get paid for sticking your nose into somebody else's business?

It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.

You have to be very brave in that first writing session.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

The only way to find out if you can write is to set aside a certain period every day and try. Save enough money to give yourself six months to be a full-time writer. Work every day and the pages will pile up.

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing.

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically.

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.

When I see these guys write all this macho stuff I want to smash their heads.

The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in the world can build it. Now, you can write a couple of checks and get one of your own.

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or in the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

The number one reason I write is to come to schools and see my readers. I would do it for free.

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

Writing checks for charities is necessary and important. But it can't compare with corporal works of mercy, which are infinitely greater.

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

My first gig, I was about 17 or 18. But I'd been singing a long time. I got a guitar when I was 8, and started trying to write songs as a teenager.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with "I've got to get another play

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

I'll write, because I'll give - You critics means to live; For should I not supply - The cause, the effect would die

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

As difficult as it is for a writer to find a publisher-admittedly a daunting task-it is twice as difficult for a publisher to sort through the chaff, select the wheat, and profitably publish a worthy list.

A piece of writing has to seduce the reader; it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.

I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.

Something good happened to my writing when I stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn't do something more complex. Don't be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

I got all the schooling any actress needs. That is, I learned to write enough to sign contract.

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

There is only one plot-things are not what they seem.

Every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.

I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

I write a lot too, so I would like to write or direct in the future if I can.

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

Sometimes the best songs almost write themselves

The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Critics don't bother me because if I do badly, I know I'm bad before they even write it. And if I'm good, I know I'm good. I know best about myself, so a critic doesn't anger me.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about. And that's really it. You know, if I really wanted to enact social change I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change. I am far lazier than that.

I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.

Writing a poem is discovering.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.

In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.

I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.