I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in … but before he ever begins...

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that...

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it...

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt...

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn’t finding an idea, it’s choosing one

A man was leaning idly against an elm. … The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at...

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody...

What’s interesting about the relationship between gay men and women is there can be a lot of affection, but there’s a line that you don’t cross.

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer’s imagination.

We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around...

I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never...

There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I’m drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.

A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.

Or maybe writers are like vultures. Some people feel we journalists are.” He mimicked a bird of prey and grinned.

Write at a pace that doesn’t surpass your creative flow. Don’t be hasty; don’t be sloppy. Don’t forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and...

1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one...

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

I think it’s incomparably sweet when someone writes something for you.. even if it doesn’t rhyme or even if it isn’t very amorous.. even two lines of hatred written for you acknowledges the fact that...

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”Oh, I am very familiar with the...

Be Shameless. Experiment. This is the only way to identify your true passion.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the...

If God didn’t want me to cross boundaries, then he wouldn’t have made me a writer.

Never take yourself too seriously. Learn to let go and let the words flow.

Most people don’t have real friends. You have people in your life waiting for opportunities to see what YOU can do for them.

Me to characters: talk to me people.

All authors go to heaven; we have paid our dues on earth by choosing to the hellish career of writing

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn’t help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

The Bible should be taught in schools – in English, with all the other fiction.

Some writers, no matter how good they are, can’t speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman...

The writing in itself is transformative for me.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that’s why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

She meant to write: “Is Christy here yet?”Auto Correct turned it into: “Is crazy here yet?”For once Auto Correct got it right.

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades...

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about...

When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there’s a part of them that believes–nay, knows–the world turns for them. Most are harmless....

That was enough dialogue for a few pages – he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren’t any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato,...

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

Characters have to be seen and felt when written, not told about. Writers are merely vessels of their manifestations.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and...

Every writer knows that ideas are the enemy.

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.’ And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. …...

My pen beats faster as I write with my heart

The only time I’ve ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel,...

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future...

Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there....