A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
