“Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.”
“All literature is gossip.”
“I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.”
“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”
“Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.”
“One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.”
“The fortune of the man who sits also sits.”
“Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself.”
“Nature is an experimenter.”
“Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.”
“This story is about love, which means that it is also about hate.”
“I's not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.”
“Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.”
“The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH — which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied — prevails.”
“Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.”
“The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.”
“I used to think I'd like to be a fireman — in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.”
“If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.”
“You cannot learn how to write drama without writing plays, putting [them] out in front of an audience, and getting humiliated.”
“'I wish' is a proclamation of something you're not go-ing to do. So rather than 'I wish,' if there's something you want, say, 'I will' or 'I intend to' or 'I'm going to' and do it. What's the worst thing that's gonna happen to you? You're going to fail? So what?”
“I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.”
“It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.”
“Writing a plot is one of the hardest things I ever learned how to do. It's just hard, because it's like playing with some unclean substance. And it is, because the unclean substance is your own consciousness.”
“Look at the scene and ask yourself "Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?" Answer truthfully. If the answer is "no" write it again or throw it out.”
“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”
“Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.”
“In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.”
“I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing.”
“You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.”
“I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.”
“Generally I start writing when I have even the smallest idea of how a book is going to go, because the physical process of writing itself keeps the mind active and focused on the job at hand.”
“Usually I write in about 5 drafts, but that simply means there are 5 definite times when I go in a linear fashion from the beginning to the end of the book.”
“There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.”
“I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it.”
“When people say "How do you write a book, how does it all happen?" I say, you line things up, and you line them up as actually as you possibly can, but sooner or later the book has got momentum and it's moving along under that momentum.”
“If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book.”
“I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.”
