Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?” And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands...

A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter’s place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he...

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of...

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Some writers aren’t writers, they are mere escapees’ and refugees’ on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often...

A kind of losing loadum is their game,Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.

Writers will happen in the best of families.

Aren’t we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they’ll tell us that we make sense?

Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed...

Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It’s a schizophrenic business.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the...

Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing...

Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.

my poetry is merely a body.you are the soul in my words.

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple...

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.

A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine...

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers...

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Climax: It’s all downhill from here.

Not every owner of a qualified high-qualified for the position, and not every man did not have the opportunity to obtain higher qualification to the circumstances of what that he is ignorant or not fit...

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.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a...

He without inspiration and motivation exists no more in a world full of innovations and inventions!

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days…it will demand absolutely everything of you.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual...

I think. I write. I am.

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all...

Which story do you want to hear my child?”he picked him up and made him sit on his lap.”Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of...

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...