Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Good morning dear. Believe in what the word has written concerning you. Have faith in God and all will be settled by the grace of

‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘writers lives were more interesting than their writing. Now-a-days neither their lives nor the writing is interesting.’

Then I began writing. It was about a German aviator in World War I. Baron Von Himmlen. He flew a red Fokker. And he was not popular with his fellow fliers. He didn’t talk to them. He drank alone and he flew alone. He didn’t bother with women, although they all loved him. He was above that. He was too busy. He was busy shooting Allied plans out of the sky. Already he had shot down 110 and he war wasn’t over. His red Fokker, which he referred to as the “October Bird of Death,” was known everywhere. Even the enemy ground troops knew him as he often flew low over them, taking their gunfire and laughing, dropping bottles of champagne to them suspended from little parachutes. Baron Von Himmlen was never attacked by less than five Allied planes at a time. He was an ugly man with scars on his face, but he was beautiful if you looked long enough — it was in the eyes, his style, his courage, his fierce aloneness.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper, write it in the present tense. You might begin by writing, ‘I am so happy and grateful now that…’ and then explain how you want your life to be in every area.

“Will you read some of your poems?”
“Christ, no.”
“Why not?”
“I just want to drink.”
“You talk about drinking a lot in your books. Do you think drinking has helped your writing?”
“No. I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.”

My old man

16 years old
during the depression
I’d come home drunk
and all my clothing–
shorts, shirts, stockings–
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown out on the
front lawn and about the
street.

my mother would be
waiting behind a tree:
“Henry, Henry, don’t
go in . . .he’ll
kill you, he’s read
your stories . . .”
“I can whip his
ass . . .”

“Henry, please take
this . . .and
find yourself a room.”

but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so I’d be back
again.

one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, “this is
a great short story.”
I said, “o.k.,”
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had observed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.

somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.

so I told him,
“o.k., old man, you can
have it.”

and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess that’s
as close
as we ever got.

Have to be on the cross and bleeding in order to have soul. They want you half mad, dribbling down your shirt front. I’ve had enough of the cross, my tank is full of that. If I can stay off the cross, I still have plenty to run on. Too much. Let them get on the cross, I’ll congratulate them. But pain doesn’t create writing, a writer does.

Writing is its own intoxication.

Not writing is not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse.

Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.

the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

The Wine of Forever.

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. It kept me from being an industrialist. It allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. It gave me space, a pause. It helped me to write this.

Then after all this reverse the procedure. Have a good love affair. And the thing you might learn is that nobody knows anything — not the State, nor the mice the garden hose or the North Star. And if you ever catch me teaching a creative writing class and you read this back to me I’ll give you a straight A right up the pickle barrel.

There was something to be learned about writing from watching boxing matches or going to the racetrack. The message wasn’t clear but it helped me. That was the important part: the message wasn’t clear. It was wordless, like a house burning, or an earthquake or a flood, or a woman getting out of a car, showing her legs. I didn’t know what other writers needed; I didn’t care, I couldn’t read them anyway. I was locked into my own habits.

“Your writing”, she said to me, “it’s so raw. It’s like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .”

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

If you asked me to write down how I feel about you, I would probably need a billion sheets of paper.

I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.

Ritsu Sohma: Please, Onii-san, please write with takoyaki power!
Mitsuru: Yes, sensei! With ikyayaki or takoyaki or whatever it takes! Write quickly, without hesitation! Ah… Um… W-what is takoyaki power?
Ritsu Sohma: Well, that is–! When Shigure-niisan eats takoyaki, he transforms into a great warrior…
Shigure Sohma: No I don’t.

Does it seem all odd to you that you enjoy biographies of great writers a lot more than you enjoy their actual writings?

I know it was y’all. Don’t ever do anything like that again. But, Lord, ‘subverting the patriarchal paradigm’ — it’s like she wrote the speech.

And I wrote my way out of the labyrinth.

I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers — where you repeat what you’ve already said with phrases like ‘In summation’, and ‘To conclude’. I didn’t do that — instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question.

This new month brings new beginnings. Don’t let this fresh page go to waste — start writing your story today.

Writing lets me face it. It chills me out. For a while anyhow. Then my wires get crossed and I have to do it all over again. I can’t understand writers who decide to stop writing. How do they chill out?

I
dislike cute cat
poems
but I’ve written one
anyhow.

Writing is also my cat. Writing lets me face it.

Chopin’s bones are dead and they are shooting from the housetops and I sit in a dirty noisy kitchen in hell writing to Henry Miller.

Maybe writing was a form of bitching. Some just bitched better than others.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they made all the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

“What will you do?”
“Oh, hell, I’ll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“Hollywood.”
“Hollywood?”
“Yes…”

Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or a cigar, open the bottle. The typer did the rest. All I had to do was be there. The whole process allowed me to continue when life itself offered very little, when life itself was a horror show. There was always the typer to soothe me, to talk to me, to entertain me, to save my ass. Basically that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‘i’s’ small.

Too many writers write for the wrong reasons. They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with bluebells in their hair… When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing, but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it. When it’s stuffed in your ears, nostrils, under your finger nails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

Sit down and write it down with a pen and then make up your mind you are going to do it. Don’t spend any time thinking of why you can’t. The fun is not in getting it, the fun is in growing. Goals are to help us grow, goals are to help us get. The getting is a site benefit; the growth is the real benefit.

Hand writing causes thinking – the repetition of writing your goal everyday will increase your awareness. The true purpose of a goal is to help you grow.

If you cannot sleep, put the sacred energy to use. You can pray, read and write.

It’s my luck that every time I feel I completely comprehend God’s plan, I don’t have a pencil with me.

The only cure for writer’s block is insomnia.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line.

Your current circumstances are part of your redemption story He is writing.

I hope you realize that every day is a fresh start for you. That every sunrise is a new chapter in your life waiting to be written.

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. Does that make sense?

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I’m in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I’m Clyde. That’s when everything is just settled. In the daytime it’s chaotic. Everybody just goin’ nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

Remember each new day you get to turn a page in your life and write your own story. So how do you choose to write it?

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor’s window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

I don’t really believe in closure. That’s something that writers talk about or people wished that they had.

An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?