Marcel Proust Quotes

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Greatness in art is always a by-product.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

When I'm writing, I thoroughly enjoy it. It just goes on.

Writing music always happened for me in periods when I wasn't under the influence of mind-altering substance.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

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.

I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

I think it's important to remember that writing is a gift and our stories are gifts to ourselves and to the world and sometimes giving isn't always the easiest thing to do but it comes back.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.