Quotes on “writing”

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

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.

and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.