…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.

…writing surrounds us: it’s not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

My mom didn’t even know about it.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in...

Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict?

I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my...

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

Writers are born, not made. We can hone the craft. We need to try to encourage someone and make a dialogue, suggesting ways to do something differently or how to improve.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

I couldn’t admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck ’em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body.

Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn’t it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an...

The adversary humbly cloaked in its fine smile ‘eyes devoid of kindness, speaking gentle its knife secretly hidden.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:

Hope is a most beautiful drug.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

All writers are different, each have their own artist way they go about telling a story. The only thing they have in common, is they write.

In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less,...

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows...

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...

…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.

Basically, writers write because they have something to say…Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world…

Mad House”)

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on...

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.