I am a meat-loving Southern girl. Add in being a writer, and that means I drink more than I should, too.

And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking.

To be a writer you have to write — and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer’s block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what’s going on has really helped.

Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and...

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

I was a ‘learn by doing’ writer – I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a...

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.

The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.

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 write because I have to; because I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands if I didn’t.

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn’t a reader yet has just not found the right book.

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

The writer’s curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.

I don’t sit on material like a sofa. I also don’t sit on material like a sofa. I’m a stand on the couch kind of writer.

A writer creates wings of words and lets them fly in the sky of readers’ minds.

I haven’t written in a week. It’s like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.

I want to write an unreliable narrator. In fact, he’ll be so unreliable that I’m not even sure he’ll show up to narrate.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director’s work.

Knocking on a door is so violent. Instead, try talking to the door to get it to open up to you. I should write a self-help book for door-to-door salesmen.

All a writer wants is to be read, and people are so flattering and lovely. I mean, there are witches out there as well. But most are so kind.

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

You can’t possibly know that you’re going to be a writer!” Miss Frost said. “It’s not a career choice.

What a writer brought to a book didn’t matter as much as what the reader contributed.

woman driver”?

The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own.

For as long as I write, I will never be lost.

…you fantasize about me reading my poems to you – it doesn’t work that way – I write down everything later – living is not an after-thought…

I’m an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by...

Suddenly, everything was beautiful. The way she viewed the world was nothing more but a reflection of herself.

Excuse me, I feel interrupted and I think I’ve overdose from the idea of loving you.

When you believe you’ve become the best writer you can be… you still aren’t.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have...

Do you drink?””Of course,I just said I was a writer.

The writer is all alone.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

I don’t even pretend to believe I know everything; I just believe in arguments God told me I had a pretty good chance of winning, while I was traveling through hell.

Having children changes you forever, as a writer and as a human being. I hope it’s for the better on both counts, but I guess we’ll see.

I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer.

You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, ‘This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get...

I was curious as to how my words started circulating at such an alarming rate. After all, every author waits to be discovered by someone. Anyone. And so I found myself smack bang in the...

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn’t...

People tell me I look like my father. I’ve never seen my dad, so does that mean I look invisible?

That’s why I wanted to be a writer – because someone I loved told me I could be one.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.