Writing

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

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

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

"Writing poems is simply an excuse to remember You."

"Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both."