“Good work doesn’t happen with inspiration. It comes with constant, often tedious and deliberate effort. If your vision of a writer involves sitting in a café, sipping an aperitif with one’s fellow geniuses, become a drunk. It’s easier and far less exhausting.”
“I learned… that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”
“The search for a story is a matter of slowly, calmly, carefully, tentatively coaxing a hidden set of somethings into visibility. Those somethings may be characters, places, situations, scenes, hopes, fears - the unseen possibilities of drama that are lurking in what we know.”
“You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something, perhaps something silly. It simply doesn’t matter what… In five or ten minutes the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.”
“… it isn’t ‘talent’ which is so important to a writer… The most important assets, I believe, are those associated with mules - a kind of stubbornness to get it done, to make it right, to make it better, and grit - not to quit - and even narrowness of purpose, a euphemism for being almost dumbly dedicated to accomplishing something.”
“If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.”
“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”
“It’s an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess you made.”
“The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.”
“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
