True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores,...

When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the samefirst thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboeplayer feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees theglorious possibilities, exactly as...

Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.

I know everything, you see,’ the old voice wheedled. ‘The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and...

When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.

Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes...

This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It’s not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient...

…{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.

The writer’s characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character’s action is, as sometimes...

My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men...

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and...

Theoretically there’s no reason one should get [writer’s block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately...

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it’s impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they’ll keep writing and you’ll have hanged yourself.

It’s not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer – not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi – though it is true that what...

The best way in the world for breaking up a writer’s block is to write a lot.

As every writer knows… there is something mysterious about the writer’s ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is ‘hot’, an invisible wall seems to fall away,...

Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world’s meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course,...

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false...

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);obstinacy...

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.’Poor Grendel’s had an accident,’ I whisper. ‘So may you all.

The people I’ve known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in...

We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair–despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we...

…ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don’t, you...

Onecannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the storyis worthwhile because until one has finished writing the storyone does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannotjudge the style...

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed,...

The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal — a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world — two snake pits.