There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
An Animated Cartoon Theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.
I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
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