Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order … defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law … are concerned.
No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared — as it always should be.
It is usual that the moment you write for publication — I mean one of course — one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.
It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence the concept about which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.
