How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
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.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
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