Writing Quotes

The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Writing is the act of discovery.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

A writer always writes.

A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

You can make anything by writing.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Good fiction creates its own reality.