Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
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.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.
If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.
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