Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.
Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.
When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
We all have a vision, a dream to hope for.
Some chase it and some wish upon it..
Who do you think, wins?
the chaser finds ways to create it, regardless of the fight, the wisher finds way to excuse it, because courage doesn't fill their hearts.
I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.
The lot of the bride
to be wed before bed
desired until rotten.
The lot of the author
to be read before bed
admired then forgotten.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.
good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.
The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
I wasn't born to cook or clean,
but to read and write,
if you don't like me the way I am,
then go fly a kite.
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
François-René De Chateaubriand
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor -thank Heaven!-always Storm.
Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.
Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I began a new story. My characters are my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.
Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.
To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.
I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.
I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months…Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.
Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.
If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.
Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.
Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
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