“To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you. ”
“When you write about what you dream, you become a writer. When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.”
“She doesn t understand that a writer is a special creature--that I m different from everyone else. I m not saying I m superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess.”
“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector s item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.”
“You want to be a writer, don t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.”
“A writer always writes.”
“To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!”
“It s strange, isn t it. You stand in the middle of a library and go aaaaagghhhh and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an aeroplane, and everyone joins in.”
“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ”
“I do not think one can assess a writer s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.”
“And so I just kept writing to myself.”
“Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P s.”
“Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won t come again And don t speak too soon For the wheel s still in spin And there s no tellin who That it s namin For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin .”
“It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ”
“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”
“All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.”
“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”