writers-on-writing

As with writing by candlelight, one__ greatest ideas come from __he flickering_ between darkness and light.

As a writer, you can__ get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn__ want to know.

A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

The power of the delete key.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we__e thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Do you know why I believe in the novel? It__ a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.

If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble!

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine__ Day.

Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.

There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

If you see it in Strunk and White it's so.

. . . any one episode, or even moment, in a person__ life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we__e found of approaching that kind of complexity.

Write on!

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.