“The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.”
“Don t fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.”
“The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.”
“I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can t be normal.”
“Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.”
“You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!”
“I m not gonna lie...sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.”
“Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.”
“If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.”
“There s an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer s mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.”
“The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.”
“When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.”
“Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?”
“Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both to sit down and write, which is what it takes to do this.”
“The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I ve somehow got to fill.”
“It wasn t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945”
“The writer, said Donald Barthelme, is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.”