There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
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.
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.
I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
or simply:
