I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.

Don’t get it right, get it written.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don’t make for good biographies.

Write what should not be forgotten.

I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on...

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But...

There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.

The best writing is when one writes from the soul

I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

…it’s good to know wave and particle alpha code, but more than that, the writer must go to the heart of life …

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It’s a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world...

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New...

When it comes to writing, clarity trumps all rules.

We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you’re not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you...

The key to high concept is that fresh twist. Make it a big one. Wow your reader. Force her to gasp when she comes to that part in your story.

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

Write drunk; edit sober.

Not everyone is fodder for books,” said Rosalind.

It’s basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn’t and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is...

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

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

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only...

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I’m struck by how much they see and how much they know–and how much I don’t.Good art writing should therefore do at least two things....

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in...

My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

You’re writing someone’s ‘future’ favorite book.

. . . But then you will want to put that {publication} behind you right away. You will want to recover the obscurity you swim best through. You’ve got eternal youth there. You’ll never be...

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

Why is it that women are the only ones who will write perfect men into fiction? It’s strange. If a man portrayed his fictional men as archangels, the feminists would throw back their heads and...

…ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the...

A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.

If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if...

teka muna”. Dahil pag lumagpas ang maikling panahong yon, kahit mag-umpog ka ng ulo sa pader mahihirapan ka nang maghabol.

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she...

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to...

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with...

Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.

Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It’s a way to find healing, and to healing others.

I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read booksand stories by bood writers. It’s a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk...

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

…my writing is a wild mustang – more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on…

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you’re dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don’t trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

intellectual” snobbery. It’s a hushed but ugly truth that people are made to feel not worthy to be among a certain set – didn’t attend the right school or don’t have the requisite abbreviations to...

Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what...

Clarity trumps all rules.