Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

We all have different voices for different occasions. I just turn those voices into characters and put them in my books.

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.

Professional writers write to fit

To put an arrogant ‘famous’ writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

For the real writers, every decision is either write or wrong.

Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht...

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.”[Peter...

The truth is that most writers are needy.

There are a lot of people, who want to be writers, who stumble at a blank page. You could imagine an algorithm that could give writers a first draft or a starter kit, so it...

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Don’t ever get to the point where you can’t be taught because life is a classroom and everyone owns a pen.

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.

I live in a world in which 40 men control wealth equal to that of nearly 80 countries, where to maintain their hegemony, countless acts of mayhem and massacre must occur every day. This is...

Writers don’t get time off. Every moment – waking or sleeping – a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.

Sometimes I dream so vividly, so expectantly, I wonder if I’m crazy…

Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?A: Explaining what that is.

I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.

Why do the lives of writers seem so… train-wrecky?

Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t...

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered...

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is...

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