Writing

"First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft."

"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."

"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

"To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!"

"فكم من الأشياء قد تحدث لنا بسبب ما نقرأ.ذلك أن ثمة قراءات تفعل بنا فعل الكتابة، وتوصلنا إلى حيث لا نتوقع !"

"Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would."

"‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."

"To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist."

"No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."

"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."

"Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd."

"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."

"Realism can break a writer's heart."

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."