People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there...

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took...

Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel; in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of...

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited...

Young writers need to be encouraged to write – just write – with no restrictions on form, style or content.

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the...

When authors write from personal experiences,straight from the heart,it touches the readers. Their work speaks out to all who read it,and most of the time,people can relate to what was written. I have always believed...

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

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the...

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers....

A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and...

Writers are born, not created.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.

It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going...

It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

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...

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words...

Wear yourself proudly.

I’ve never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don’t ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it’s free.

Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the...

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers or...

Of all the smiths from goldsmiths to John Smiths, the most powerful is the wordsmith, because he can influence your emotions and cognitions. And while you are standing there pondering what he said, he can...

The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Most writers adore their editors, and I’m no exception.

Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of...

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof Ihope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am notunderstood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profoundis...

As writers, we only aim to please. Or we aimed to please as children, which is why we became writers.

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by...

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.