To all you writers, artists, musicians, creative types who want to give up: It’s okay to walk away for a bit. Get your second wind. But your writing, art, music will be there, lurking over...

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something–a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question—-ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness.

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is...

The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

Every artist takes their final work to the grave.

…you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you’ve sold your first book.

It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your...

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

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today’s writing falls into the first category.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance– not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble...

some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other.

One of Scotland’s most important cultural exports – stories.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.