Howard Fast Quotes

I'll never live to write all the stories I have in my head.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

I have written my own screen version of Pern, but had no buyers yet.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

I seem to only write New York stories because it's the only thing that inspires or interests me.

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

Writers always think their greatest work is just ahead of them.

I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.

Boredom is your imagination calling to you.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

I hate everything about writing except doing it.

Everyone thinks they've got a book inside them.

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.