Henry Miller Quotes

I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.

I don't really like to write at a desk. I like to write when driving in a car. ... Once you're working on it, you're working on it all the time, and sometimes stuff'll come in the middle of the night, in a dream or something. Your mind is working on it all the time.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

I'm a long distance runner, and I get my best ideas when I'm out running. It also helps that I can't write it down immediately - if you hold onto an idea, other things will stick on it.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

I'm always thinking of stuff; I just don't sit down and write it. I come up with material more as I go along; if something funny happens, I'll make a note of it on my phone.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

You find there's no magic trick, sometimes in the shower, sometimes you're just lying in bed calm, sometimes you're just enjoying life and just have a notepad, it's never far away. Always have a notepad on you, because you never know what's going to happen, take a moment and write it down the minute that comes in your head. Even if you can't deal with it until later, I've had that experience where I was in a wedding party and I'm on stage, I'm like, "I hope I don't forget this, something just occurred to me."

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

Ideas are floating like fish. Desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you desire an idea, it pulls and it makes a kind of a bait. Ideas will come swimming up. And you don't know them until they enter the conscious mind. And then bingo! There it is! You know it instantly. And then more come in. If you go fishing for ideas, a lot of ideas will just pop in. And one of them will make you fall in love.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated