Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write.

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time.

I'm not sure sports writing is an art.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Gather knowledge about the craft of writing. Immerse yourself in the art of it. Then write. Write yourself silly. Write yourself mad. Write yourself blind. Trust the excitement that builds within you when the idea is good and the writing is superb. You can do it, but that's the hell of it as well as the exultation of it. You have to do it.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

While I was drawn to the Renaissance, my first (unpublished) novels took place in modern times. When the subject of alchemy started creeping into my stories, an astute mentor observed that the bits about alchemy might fit better in another time frame. When I finally decided to weave the pieces about the medieval science into historical settings, a successful novel began to emerge. (And I dusted off that art history book, and put it to use once again.)

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.