It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.
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Gore Vidal
Novelist, essayist and playwright
United States · 1925–2012
Arts and letters
American novelist, essayist and playwright, author of Julian, Myra Breckinridge and Lincoln, and one of the most widely read essayists of his generation.
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I remember being present when a Jesuit priest in Rome asked Tennessee Williams, “How do you write a play?” and Tennessee said, “Well, I start with a sentence.” Well, I start with a sentence, and that’s how you write a book.
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