St. Lucia Quotes

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

I don't write to a genre.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When I write, I just let my characters go, the way I let life go.

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.

If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing.