The truth is that most writers are needy.

I learn my world through writing.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds...

I don’t think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don’t...

It’s amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story… don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words–the language. Don’t be...

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always...

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...

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building...

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it’s all the same genre.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear,...

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

For me, all writing — storytelling and style — gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the...

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,...

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn

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.