"To write is in some way to cut the seemingly automatic pattern
to violence, destructiveness and death wish. To write is to put
the seeming insignificance of human existance into a different
perspective. It is the need, the wish, and please God, the ability,
to reorder our physical faith." "Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't
bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven
by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually
too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will
rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the
work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art." "He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things
is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever,
leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities
and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which
any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and
pride and compassion and sacrifice."
"You must write every single day of your
life.
"You must read dreadful dumb books and
glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your
head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
"You must lurk in libraries and climb
the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books
like hats upon your crazy heads.
"I wish you a wrestling match with your
Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
"I wish craziness and foolishness and
madness upon you.
"May you live with hysteria, and out
of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise.
"Which finally means, may you be in love
every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake
a world.
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