Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You’re my ideal reader, friend, partner. I’m your fan.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings...

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map...

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the...

I would like to tell you that I wrote my book to push back artistic boundaries. But I didn’t. I wrote it to impress a girl.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told...

I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’ Notice the ‘glimpse’ part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something...

I really didn’t write it with any intention of being published. If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a...

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t...

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

My reason for being an author? Because I love to write – it fulfills me. But the fact that I entertain others by doing it is a lovely bonus.

It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job...

A book is not completed till it’s read.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t...

It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.

1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one...

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

Whenever I’m asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing,...

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining– small mining. You’re too young a...

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

…but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: ‘My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, “The Cookiepants Hypotenuse.”‘ Or else they get...

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But...

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Am I making something worth while?I’m not sure.I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts,but am I making...

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement...