Quotes on “writing”

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.