“Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”
“Pulling poems and quotes from a hat seems to be the easiest way to write.”
“If you find it interesting enough to write, someone will find it interesting enough to read.”
“I hate writing, I love having written.”
“The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.”
“Great poetry is pulled from a magic hat.”
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don t know how many branches it s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I m much more a gardener than an architect.”
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
“You don t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
“10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer Write. Write more. Write even more. Write even more than that. Write when you don’t want to. Write when you do. Write when you have something to say. Write when you don’t. Write every day. Keep writing.”
“we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.”
“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”
“Writing is a struggle against silence.”
“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”
“It s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn t even know you were aiming for.”
“You can always edit a bad page. You can t edit a blank page.”
“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”