“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Lady By A Window Writing, 1827, by Georg Freidrich Kersting.

“That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”

-Anthony Burgess.

William S. Burrough’s typewriter?

“I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh… they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.”

-William S. Burroughs.

“I’m a bit of a grinder. Novels are very long, and long novels are very, very long. It’s just a hell of a lot of man-hours. I tend to just go in there, and if it comes, it comes. A morning when I write not a single word doesn’t worry me too much. If I come up against a brick wall, I’ll just go and play snooker or something or sleep on it, and my subconscious will fix it for me. Usually, it’s a journey without maps but a journey with a destination, so I know how it’s going to begin and I know how it’s going to end, but I don’t know how I’m going to get from one to the other. That, really, is the struggle of the novel.”

-Martin Amis.

Where Martin Amis does his writing.

“You must stay drunk on writing so that reality can not destroy you.”

- Ray Bradbury.