You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred...

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as...

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting...

.. be more Creative, every Day, every Hours, every Minutes or every Seconds and if possible every MOMENT 🙂

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do...

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing,...

Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is...

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and...

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a...

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

When you’re writing, you’re creating something out of nothing … A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.”[As quoted on WritersServices, 6 March 2012]

What “inspires” my books? Really I don’t know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t...

If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget...

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things...

People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.

Consuming the content and culture of creatives does not make one a creative. Creating makes a creative.

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write...

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Please don’t entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished...

Enmerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a...

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within...

The trick, of course, is to lose one day and come back to win the next. But that is possible only when we draw healthy pleasure and confidence from our creative processes.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting...

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no...

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”[Modernism’s Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]

…it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone...

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who...

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your ideas?”And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for...

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

We can imagine how to create and be creative on a beach in a cosmic sky. No grain of sand is merely just sandy; with imagination at hand the sand can become whatever you fancy.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the...

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility: it contains the mind’s promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not...

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth...

Art is a journey of excellence not a goal of perfection.

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor...

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”[From the preface.]

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a...

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never...

… an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

If we allow our “high creativity” to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people...

Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as creator but seldom see “creator” as the literal term for “artist”. I am suggesting you take the term “creator” quite literally. You are seeking...