I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fi...
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic, with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings.
Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
Well, for instance, why does everything always have to be written from the point of view of a human being? Why not write from the point of view of a cat? Or a tree?
Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.
True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher? No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.
Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.
When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.
Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.
If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.
