“There is no rule on how to
write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling
rock and then blasting it out with charges.” - “There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - “But sometimes when I was
starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the
fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and
watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the
roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you
will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest
sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go
on from there.”
“Do you suffer when you write? I
don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel
empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.” -
“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I
have good luck and write better than I can.” - “Since I had started to break
down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of
describe, writing had been wonderful to do.”
“As a writer, you should not judge,
you should understand.” - “If a writer stops observing he is finished.
Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.” - “A writer
should write what he has to say and not speak it.” - “Good writing is good
conversation, only more so.” - “Any man's life, told truly, is a novel...”
“All good books are alike in that
they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished
reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all
belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the
people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can
give that to people, then you are a writer.”
“I believe that basically you
write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not
that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether they can read or
write or not and whether they are alive or dead.” - “You can write any time
people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you
will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you
are in love.”
“Writing, at its best, is a
lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I
doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his
loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if
he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
“If the reader prefers, this book
may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of
fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” - “People who
write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful
liars.”
“The first draft of anything is
shit.” - “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to
put the shit in the wastebasket.” - “I always try to write on the principle of
the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that
shows.” - “Write drunk; edit sober.”
“All modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing
comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good
since.” - “A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
- “It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move
around better.”
“Once writing has become your
major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”
