What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer’s mind below the surface? They’d think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see...

What you really want is all too often hidden just behind what you think you want.

Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

…hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV – I...

About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length.

What I like most about reading is I can read in minutes what it took the author hours to write. What I like most about writing is readers can read in minutes what it took...

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely...

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking,...

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in...

There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.

Never Let The Roosters Wake You!

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have...

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they feel so real...

If your looking to write a book, your creativity, originality and simplicity is what will distinguish you.

The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.

…it’s not the stories – it’s the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told …

There are more writers who read than readers who write.

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks...

This is the nature of love.” Vashet said. “To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete,...

My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

Without the dreamers who write science fiction and other imaginary material we’d still be sitting in caves … if we weren’t already extinct.

A story is a part of the writer’s soul. Told to the world.

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres – the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.

You say you’re a writer but you’re depressed. Not an excuse; write from there. Write some depressing sh*t. Believe me. You will have plenty of readers who can relate. Remember writers write.