Look back, but never look down.

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

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,...

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…

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 a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn’t travel very far.””What stuff is that?” he’d asked her.”We’re completely at ease being naked in front of...

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the...

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.

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

A writer’s style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent...

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.

As a writer, I like the list of “things to strive for” that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigorous dramatization of story

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean...

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better...

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Rejection. Rejection. You can’t handle rejection!

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.

When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

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.