-
Life is about trying things to see if they work.
-
That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.
-
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
-
The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.
-
Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.
-
Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt
-
It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.
-
I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.
-
Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.
-
So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.
-
If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
-
You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.
-
A day without writing was a little death.
-
Joy is the grace we say to God.
-
Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.
-
Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.
-
You learn to live with your crazy enthusiasms which nobody else shares, and then you find a few other nuts like yourself, and they're your friends for a lifetime. That's what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world, because nobody else is going to give a damn what you're doing, so you need a few other people like yourself.
-
I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.
-
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
-
If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.
-
How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
-
We've got to reinvest in space travel. We should have never left the moon.
-
I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to get the subconscious to do the work for you, and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural. During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level and need only be summoned in the heat of writing.
-
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.