I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.
Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
Writing is a delicious agony.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
كل الكتاب خبثاء ، وكل القراء أغبياء يصدقونهم فيعيشون حياة غير حياتهم ، سرقة مع سبق الإصرار للوقت والعمر الجميل ولايشكوأحد
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
