
“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”
Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
Blogcritics interview (2007)
Context: I've used pseudonyms for various reasons. In my earliest days I was writing too much, and needed to shift some of the product over to other front men. I've also done it to establish the different tones of the different writings: Stark doesn't write very much like Westlake at all.
“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”
Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Letter to Bernard Berenson (2 October 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“One ruins the mind with too much writing. — One rusts it by not writing at all.”
“Happiness is like the first blissful intoxication of morphine.
It doesn't last very long.”
Erik (p. 397)
Phantom (1990)
and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page. But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have".
Phlogiston interview (1995)
Interview on French talk show Quotidien (26 April 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUlTS87WGkw&t=682
"An Interview with World Fantasy Award Finalist Brian Mcnaughton" by Jeff VanderMeer, in The Ministry of Whimsy (1998) http://www.epberglund.com/RGttCM/nightscapes/NS11/ns11nf1.htm
Context: I believe that we are soft creatures in a world with some very hard edges. It's remarkable that we survive at all, much less do high deeds or write great music. I think … tension … is a condition of our existence, and I do my best to depict it.