Zen in the Art of Writing

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself.

By work, by quantitative experience, man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand.

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.

If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.

Aldous Huxley’s “The Education of an Amphibian” in his book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours earlier.

One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style,