Wishful thinking
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
—Neil Gaiman
The Writer’s Job
The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
—Vladimir Nabokov
The Well
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
– Ernest Hemingway
A Quality of Redemption
I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.
– Michael Connelly
Nothing to it…
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
– Ernest Hemingway
Simply the best…
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
– Ernest Hemingway
Looking into the Abyss
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
– Michael Connelly
You don’t need demons
“I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.”
― Tess Gerritsen, The Mephisto Club
The terrible thing…
The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one.
—James Baldwin
Cracks…
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
—Leonard Cohen
