Writing

"“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”" - Stephen King

"When did you last read a book of poetry or take time, of an afternoon, for an essay or two?" - Ray Bradbury

"Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation." - Ray Bradbury

"Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered." - Martin Amis

"Still, I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season." - Stephen King

"A well-fed man keeps and calmly gives forth his infinitesimal portion of eternity. It sounds big in the summer night. And it is, as it always was down the ages, when there was a man with something to tell, and ones, quiet and wise, to listen." - Ray Bradbury

"writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see… or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different." - Stephen King

"‘Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity,’ summoned not by any ‘external compulsion’ but ‘from within yourself’. You cannot do otherwise. And the same went for Saul: if it comes from within yourself, then you cannot do otherwise. No novelist can." - Martin Amis

"Because novels come from long-marinated and unregarded anxiety, from silent anxiety…" - Martin Amis