Three words for a writer: Make me care.

I think the reason why I don’t read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand...

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a...

I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not...

Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.

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

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is...

If I knew what I was thinking […] I would never have become a writer.

I’m in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.

The Bible should be taught in schools – in English, with all the other fiction.

Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn’t stop.

Writing is what happens when the words in your head are overpowered by the words in your heart.

A veces tengo la impresión de que escribo por simple curiosidad intensa. Es que, al escribir, me entrego a las sorpresas más inesperadas. Es a la hora de escribir que muchas veces me vuelvo consciente...

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn’t finding an idea, it’s choosing one

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

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

Ink, a Drug.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

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

You know, my dear, it’s only doing you harm to write vers libre. After you have been writing strict, rhyming verse for about 10 years it will be time to venture on the free sort....

Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.

Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge,...

When sitting down to write a letter, it always pays to calm one’s mood, collect one’s thoughts, and have a plan.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Somecan breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some...

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible,...

There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest,not what pays

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

I wear the writer pants in the family.

People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children’s story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great...

It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

The pen that was once a gift has come to represent all that I hope to achieve.

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So,...

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen...

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

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Basically, writers write because they have something to say…Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world…

If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot;...

Good editors are priceless.

Someone asked me, ‘How do you write a book?’ I said, ‘I live with a pen in one hand.

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.