All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

“My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.”

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”

“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”

“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”

“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.”

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”

“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.”