Quotes on “writing”

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

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

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

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.