It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it’s impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they’ll keep writing and you’ll have hanged yourself.
Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.’Poor Grendel’s had an accident,’ I whisper. ‘So may you all.
Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
The people I’ve known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.
My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.
The best way in the world for breaking up a writer’s block is to write a lot.
Theoretically there’s no reason one should get [writer’s block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.
The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.
When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.
What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot…
I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it’s all a hero asks for.
The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers.
All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal — a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world — two snake pits.
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.
…{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
It’s not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.
God be kind to all good Samaritans and also bad ones. For such is the kingdom of heaven.