The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
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.
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
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