Quotes About Writing

When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconcious. And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.

Writing is not a serious business. It's a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say 'Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…', you know. Now, to hell with that. It's not work. If it's work, stop and do something else.

Business or profession?' 'I guess you'd call me a writer.' No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I love to write. It's all I do.

Teachers say if you write a story you must never name what you're trying to write. Just do it. When it's over you'll know what you've done.

I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my wife, and our baby daughter.

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.

In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel--all are a living process, quick thought, emotion making yet more quick thought, and so on, cycling round.

I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me. (Paris Review Interview)

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado. JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

You stumble into it, mostly. You don't know what you're doing, and suddenly, it's done. You don't set out to reform a certain kind of writing. It evolves out of your own life and night scares.

The good writers touch life often.

A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

At the exact moment when truth erupts, the subconscious changes from wastebasket file to angel writing in a book of gold.

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we'd die, we'd wander around and sleep like cats.

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or trigger-trapping.

You only fail if you stop writing.

I am a passionate, not an intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.