Writing

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film."

"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."

"A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

"Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got."

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."

"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of."

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

"A word after a word after a word is power."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"You can make anything by writing."

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."