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Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
























