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We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
Sep 10, 2025
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
Exercise the writing muscle every day.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
You don't have to get it right the first time.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
People will never forget how you made them feel.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.