Writers are in many ways like demi-gods. With one stroke of a pen they can give life to a character, or strike them from existence, with nary a twinge of grief at their passing.

When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will...

Writers wake up the world.

that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.

A writer is never just looking out of a window or staring into space. They are building a universe to share with the world

If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter...

At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them...

Every day in New York City is a test. Work hard and pass this test, you get a chocolate cookie. From a strange man on the subway. A man without pants.

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

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great...

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

Literature is language charged with meaning

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the...

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we...

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police – preferably in writing.

A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. ‘Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?”You know what. You know I’m going to be a ball player.”Well, I’m going to be a writer. And when I say that’s a mountain, that’s a mountain.’ Satisfied, she turned back to her town.

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

The sea of reporters on her lawn made Loretta Brooks do a double take.

The fat man looked amused. “What on earth for?” he said. “I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.

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

…bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius – not the display of talent…

A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.

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

Write the ending first and then you’ll know before the opening sentence that it’s going to be a good book.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.

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

Mad House”)

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time.

To create art with all the passion in one’s soul is to live art with all the beauty in one’s heart.

If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

Good editors are priceless.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

Waandishi wanapaswa kuwa wadadisi, kama paka, ijapokuwa udadisi ni hatari.

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

Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.