Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.
Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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