Easy reading is damn hard writing.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
In good writing, words become one with things.
You fail only if you stop writing.
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
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