Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do...

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.

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

Do Engineers have stories, Jack?” he asked. “What?” Jack said, without moving.”Stories. Myths. Things to keep the boredom out on a long shift.””I think they play cards, mostly,” Jack answered. It was a lie, but...

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

I wonder if that’s the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

I’ve met talespinners before, Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re afraid of life.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author,...

Writers should provoke disagreement.

Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder...

Forever encased in the amber of a writer’s prose.

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I...

The stories are not made, they are discovered.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque...

There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium...

A writer is someone who analyses the society, people and the world around him or her. Simply a writer is someone who pays attention to the utmost simple things happening around him or her. I...

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write …

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

It’s okay to fail. It does not make you forever a failure. In fact, there are no failures really. Only human beings doing the best they can.

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

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal. It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It’s much more relaxing to actually write.

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find...

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

As a thinker, and most writers would consider themselves thinkers, your competition is not only the whole world, but it’s also the people of the past, and the people of the future. And the people...

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

What doesn’t kill us gives us something new to write about.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

A writer’s courage: to leave a blank page blank.

Why would anyone pay for writing anymore when there’s Facebook and why would anyone pay for music anymore when there’s YouTube.

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in...

I’m one of the writers that would die if I didn’t say what I needed to say. For me, it’s a matter of survival to write.

La mitad de la belleza depende del paisaje y la otra mitad de quien mira.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation.

But writers and their woes: they couldn’t be parted. Not for anything.

…ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the...

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.All are continually asking, “What does this represent? What does it stand for?”They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When...

Never give up, Never surrender!!!!!If you think you can’t, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins

Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing...

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.”(on Mark Twain)

I think a great many people would enjoy doing what I did, and that is why they enjoy books and movies (and even TV shows these days) that feature Torture and Dismemberment, etc., etc., etc.

i am infinitely yearningbrimmingand overflowingin wordsi discoverit’s another wayfor meto be in tears.

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope – to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that...

all that really matters to me is that there are critics.