P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

After putting the kids to bed, I would think about what I wanted to write.

You can only write your own vision.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.