Let your passion bleed through your work. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an...

I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many...

To write a good book, you must read one book for each page of the book you are about to write.

Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold.

As individuals, great writers from Villon to Diderot to Voltaire toRousseau to Byron or Shelley have often shown themselves to beirresponsible, selfish, mean or sometimes even cowardly people. Their lives were drab or self destructive...

Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.

Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful...

Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

I like to read books one after another. Immerse myself in a book, and then immerse myself in the next book, and just keep going until there aren’t any more books left to swim in....

Always being truthful gives you a certain kind of freedom. It springs forth like a fountain splashing throughout your body until it floods your soul. To be honest and to be trustworthy are great attributes....

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course,...

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make...

i want to never settle for anything less than my soul on paper.

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”(on Lillian Hellman)

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER...

mind-boggling” moments, when I would doubt myself and what I was writing. It has been said that we, ourselves, are our own worst critics.All the hard work had payed off though, and I created a...

DRAMA: Be careful about being baited into the personal battles and confusion of others. If you want to help someone out emotionally, be certain he or she has made a commitment to the sacrifice before...

In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.

Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.

You can never kill the spirit of an artist. They will always rewrite their resurrection and paint an eternal sunset with a blaze of orange that no one has seen before.

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in...

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Book sense makes sense because someone has gone through it before and able to share it with you. Your job is to listen and discern.

Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.

The only thing in life that’s really interesting is the contest. We are all contestants–whether we admit it or not. If I read 20 pages of a book and they’re no good, I put it...

A Decision That Can Change Your Life Forever, Can Happen In Just One Second.

I read your diary. I KNOW.

Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons:...

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the...

It is the writer’s job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

We need to stop trying to get attention by seeing who can scream and cry the loudest. Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks….

And I love Jane Austen’s use of language too–the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom...

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a...

Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they’re complete, not leading...

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his...

A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense,...

There’s writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like p...

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.