280 Quotes About On-writing

Quiet people have the loudest minds

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth...We confuse facts with truth.

Measure twice; cut once.

Waiting rooms were made for books—of course!

There's only one absolute rule in writing: None of us gets it right the first time. Revise, reverse, reinvent, re-vision.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think).