If you have a story inside you but don’t know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

Very well then! I’ll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his...

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

I don’t know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill...

Please then, can we stop this obsession with the tiny minority of writers who have made a fortune from their work, and/or those who look hot in their author pics. Please can we also stop...

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the...

It’s a great day to write a best-seller.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

How become a writer? Naturally.

Walking the Camino de Santiago taught me the wonders of physical challenge, the wonders of spiritual freedom, and the wonders of baby powder.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they...

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in...

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing...

…she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

I before E except after C. Weird?By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.I think all writers are weird.

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just...

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose...

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Nostalgia!” Miss Frost cried. “You´re nostalgic!” She repeated. “Just how old are you, William?” She asked.”Seventeen, ” I told her.”Seventeen!” Miss Frost cried, as if she’d been stabbed. “Well, William Abbott, if you’re nostalgic at...

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!

I have always thought that writers come with any variety of attributes. Some are capable and some aren’t.

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

Even great, best selling writers produce works that fall flat from expectations. This writing thing isn’t easy and everything you produce won’t be a best seller, but you must write anyway. You have to write...

She meant you have to live a story for a time.”And?”And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?”Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.”Kind of the perfect question to answer in...

There are still so few female directors. There are far fewer writers than we’d like to see.

Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

I didn’t want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for...

The hunger for knowing is what excites me. I get to geek out about editing, be on set, give notes to writers – I love it all.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on...

An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

I’d never be where I am if more successful writers hadn’t taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

We need writers who fear nothing. (“Our Goal”)

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they’re writing it!

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

The writers want to know were you made your mistake, no how well your curve is breaking.

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.