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...

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.

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

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.

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

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….

If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – then success is insanity squared!(2012 SCBWI New Member Conference; Richmond, VA)

Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on...

i want to bleed ink and shit prose.

A witer’s mind is NEVER silent. It is always conducting the next symphony of words.

I’m not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.

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.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author,...

You might lose battles in your life time. However, every person that stands bravely on the side of justice, for people that have no voice, wins the true battle—Gods.

I’m going to be a person who writes stories.I never told mom and dad how much I loved them.I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.

I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.

Say something worthwhile and people will listen.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading...