This crazy little love affair with writing

I love reading writers who are exact: they use the exact words/phrases to convey exactly what they mean. They are deliberate in their expression and intentional in their word choice. When they are equivocal, they are decidedly equivocal.

I love it when I'm able to write this way.

I love it when I am able to write, period.

Here are some things writers said about writing:

Not to lie, ever, in writing a novel, that is my goal. To keep pushing for what feels like the ultimate truth. I don't have an elaborate conscious sense of the truth, so much as a sense of what is genuine. I write in order to exist; not to feel like a monster. I write to be human. ~ Anne Rice

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~André Gide, Journals, 1894

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we? ~Terri Guillemets

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon

Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe

Writers are not just people who sit down write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is stake. ~E.L. Doctorow

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

When I write, I'm conscious of creating a world in which I want to live and breathe; and when violence inevitably enters into that world, when things go wrong, when bad things happen, I don't feel I can fully control it anymore than I can accept it. I strive for authenticity and courage. ~ Anne Rice