Quote collection
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"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."
"Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."
"He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to."
"I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous."
"The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture."
"Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic."
"When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'"
"The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season."
"The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium."
"Hurt's a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don't change facts."
"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common."
"Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it."
"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it."
"For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all."
"Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced."
"Why don't we all just go crazy when we know were going to croak? Because the mind's a monkey. You put things in departments and you go ahead. You go on and plan for the future and assume that the future's going to work out okay. Yet we know that sooner or later we're all going to be eating worms, whether it's fifty years or sixty. It might be tomorrow. It might happen today."
"And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live."
"The thought process can never be complete without articulation."
"You could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all."
"Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again."