Ignore people who say you can’t do it, even if this person is yourself.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are...

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

I tell everyone who asks me about writing…almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it’s that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

For every idea that’s been done to DEATH, there’s a child being BORN who hasn’t read it yet. Don’t kill your dragons.

But if you don’t understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

Description is the color in the canvas of your story.

Writing is the act of discovery.

No good story is quite true.

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don’t tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.

Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: “At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.

The only ‘ironclad rules’ in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the...

The only difference between writers and people who don’t write is that writers aren’t afraid to display their demons.

According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a ‘poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,’ since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the...

For me, art that’s alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the...

Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).Faulkner, reimagined by me.

Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn’t work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.Sit down, and write.

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

Aspiring authors, get this through your head. Cover art serves one purpose, and one purpose only, to get potential customers interested long enough to pick up the book to read the back cover blurb. In...

…a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator….

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn’t have to–and indeed cannot–capture the hearts of every possible reader...

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

When asked for advice on how to write a short story, Carlos Cortés responded, No advice. Every writer has to exorcise his own demons.

A watched pot never boils.” It’s the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.

A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Lots of times I’m not crazy about the writing, but I keep moving ahead and somehow it gets better. The important thing is to move forward.

Write because you love it, not because you want to become rich. Your story will be better for it.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s...

Does rejection ever get any easier? Only if we decide not to invest emotion in the dismissal…

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry...

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

There is nothing more valuable in the writing process than a friend to hold you accountable to your own potential.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.

If you wish to be a writer– then write, and don’t allow anyone to tell you that you’re on the ‘wrong’ path. You know where you’re going, and each word you write gets you a...

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost...

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and...

Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.

Heinlein’s Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must WriteRule Two: Finish What Your StartRule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial OrderRule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the MarketRule Five: You...