Writing

"I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

"Have you thought of an ending"Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant."Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after"It will do well, if it ever came to that."Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works."

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."

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

"The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself."

"There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well."

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

"If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea."

"You can't edit a blank page"

"When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it."

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been."

"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter"

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"

"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

"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."

"No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"... No woman has ever written enough."

"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."