writers

Words raced thru his mind and his fingers ached to capture them all on paper.

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?

Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what__ going on around them when they are the center of attention.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

Writing isn__ necessarily a gift it is a passion. You can write a one page masterpiece to 99 pages of crap. What keeps you coming back is that Zen moment when you enlightened your own self with a few cleverly arranged words and saved yourself a $200 trip to the shrink, by simply buying a #2 pencil.

Nothing expresses Kafka__ innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of __riting as a form of prayer_: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.

Maybe Laura__ real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die__f not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

She had words in her heart which she released thru her fingertips.

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.

New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.