On Writing Quotes

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

The good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.

my own definition of bad historical fiction hits these points:It fails to transport the reader to a former time.It fails to put the reader in another place.It fails to bring characters to life.It fails to make the reader shiver, sweat, sniffle, sneer, snarl, weep, laugh, gag, ache, hunger, wince, yearn, lust, lose sleep, empathize, hate, or need to go potty.It seems dubious.It has characters who seem too good or too bad to be true.It has anachronisms.It has clichés and stereotypes.Its writing style distracts the reader from the narrative.It takes historic license with times and facts.It is pointless.It is carelessly written.It is easy to put down.

Writing is about truth, whether it be fiction or a school essay. Don't give in and 'fake it till you make it.' Criticize what upsets you.

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain as much truth as a high-school history textbook approved by a state board of education. But having been designated “historical fiction” by its publisher, it is presumed to be less reliably true than that textbook. If fiction were defined as “the opposite of truth,” then much of the content of many approved historical textbooks could be called “historical fiction.”But fiction is not the opposite of truth. Fiction means “created by imagination.” And there is plenty of evidence everywhere in literature and art that imagination can get as close to truth as studious fact-finding can.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Write to your fear.

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

I think the best thing about being a writer is getting to dream. It's constantly viewing life through the "what if?" lens.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.

Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.

Some writers don't believe they're ready to begin writing the story until they've finished all the research they can think of to do — until they're sure of everything. That's a logical approach, of course. The more factual knowledge, the less likelihood you'll have to throw out a lot of glorious prose when you find out that something you assumed to be true wasn't.But one problem with delaying your start until the research is all done is that the research is never all done.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings of a fragile butterfly, it is how you touch and reveal those inner parts of yourself, without damaging the psyche, that determines whether the beauty is experienced and expressed and shared with others or, in fact, becomes the death of the self and Soul and psyche. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama. Every story is a kind of puzzle. Many have obvious solutions, and some have no solution at all. We write to present questions, sometimes complicated questions, not to offer easy or not-so-easy answers. Do not be misled by the limited vocabulary the American marketplace uses to describe the possibilities for story and drama. If we’re really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up the crucible of their days and certainly not always—if ever—capable of articulating their condition.

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

A book is not completed till it's read.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

I learn my world through writing.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means “dead hand.” Its definition is: “The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.