“If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget about perfection. Just be satisfied that you ve done the best work you can do at this stage in your life as an author. Then roll the rocket onto the launch pad and fire it off. After that, write another story. Always keep going. Move fast. Stay one step ahead of the forces of distraction and self-doubt. Love your characters enough to give them a good home. Love your readers enough to give them a place of refuge from life s tragedies, big and small. And love the world you live in enough to make it the world of your dreams.”
“A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.”
“I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn t capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.”
“...kapag binisita ka ng idea, gana o inspirasyon, kailangan mong itigil LAHAT ng ginagawa mo para lang di masayang ang pagkakataon. Walang “sandali lang” o “teka muna”. Dahil pag lumagpas ang maikling panahong yon, kahit mag-umpog ka ng ulo sa pader mahihirapan ka nang maghabol.”
“...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...”
“All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
“Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.”
“Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.”
“If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can t make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.”
“The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.”
“Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book..... just start with a word!”
“In quickness is truth. 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 tiger-trapping.”
“Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.”
“Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.”
“Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.”
“Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born. Sleep Has His House describes in the night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day.”
“To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don t come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it s not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.”