writers-on-writing

When a writer doesn__ show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God__ famous reluctance to appear.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far.""What stuff is that?" he'd asked her."We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city.

Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You__l never wish you__ held back a little more.

There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.

The writer doesn__ want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn__ want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcendthem. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.

He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".

Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . . how they eke out some measure of freedom and personal space and integrity . . . trying to negotiate their way toward some sort of, if not happiness, then at least accommodation or peace with themselves.

Art uses truth and beauty__oth of which can be quite ugly, even as that ugliness is transcended__o foster change, growth, love, perception, friendship. Something that doesn__ do that can be great. But I wouldn__ call it art [_]

If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims.

Whenever people ask me, "How are your books doing?" or, "How is your book doing?" I just say, "It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better.

The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.

Good editors are priceless.

He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they__e yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises _ in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.

A tweet a day keeps writer's block away.