Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to...

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better.

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

& I love Wordplay

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict?

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

I’m trying to give my character voice but he won’t speak.

The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in...

Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

… The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper,...

I love being a writer, what I can’t stand is the paperwork.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing...

Being a writer brings out a sassy woman inside me, and I love her so.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had...

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it...

Writing help us to express our thoughts, to share experiences, to think, to love, to inspire, to motivate, to challenge, to liberate, to learn, to hope, to smile and to wonder.

Our work is to present things that are as they are.

Writing heals my heart like no pill ever could.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a...

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don’t simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and...

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.

I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can’t be normal.

Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader…

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said —...

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than...

The word ‘NO’ is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

¦ Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors — somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating — none of us can name two French...

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

I loss Muse!

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the...