Nick Tosches Quotes

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

Anybody who tells you they're not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

How can you write if you can't cry?

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

That was one of the key things - when you asked the story about the writing of the story - one of the things we wanted to make sure was that it grew out of.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

I just write when fear overtakes me.