The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
But I don't sit down at dinner and have clever ideas.
I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.
There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.
We're all normal, flawed people who have off-the-cuff thoughts.
A lot of the letters that are coming in - a lot of them are queries or comments - are one sentence long... These are from Twitter. And if you look at the nature of those one sentence letters, most of the time it's something that came to somebody's mind - somebody walking down the street had a thought and sent it out. If they thought about it for two minutes they would not have sent it.
I'm just saying what I think about at the time. I don't make a point to do anything, really.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.
