Paul Virilio Quotes

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

You become a great writer by writing.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

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.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

In my own work, when I start off writing a scene, I don't know which physical details are going to turn out to be meaningful. But, inevitably, certain images will stand out - you start to decide which ones are important as you go.