Quote collection
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses."
"In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves."
"I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him."
"I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar."
"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen"
"There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this."
"The dream might have been more than a dream. It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar... and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through."
"there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst."
"For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school."
"Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life."
"Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing."
"Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?"
"It was like drowning, only from the inside out."
"If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work."
"You can't polish a turd."
"Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path."
"The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease & intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut."
"There's nothing as human as hunger. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art."
"No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves."