Official website of the author
Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own…
Joseph Epstein (via austinkleon)
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
H.L. Mencken
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
I’m not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business.
Stephen King (via)
Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via)
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
Dr. Seuss (possibly a misattribution, but a great quote whoever said it) (via Garr Reynolds)
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Economist Herbert Simon, 1971
I can quite understand people wanting to know my writings, but I cannot sympathise with anybody wanting to know me.
Vladimir Nabokov, who “despised the idea of the author as celebrity” (via)
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
Me too.