Quotes on “writing”

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

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.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

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

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.