Joseph Campbell Quotes

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.

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

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

It's just writing about things, feelings, not that we're dark or depressed...just as much as anyone else is.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something.

I do write, but for now I am keeping it all in the desk drawer. I have always written. The only book that I have published was "Revolution," during the election campaign, a book that contains both personal and political chapters. I have never been happy with what I have written, including three novels that, from my point of view, are incomplete.

Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.

For me writing is so perplexing, because if we were playing ping pong and we weren't writing - twenty years later you'd be just so much better at ping pong and this confidence with ping pong.