Writing is about allowing yourself to become a vessel of creativity. Writers are avatars of creation. We have tender hearts, and strong emotions. It’s hard not to when you have a million different people’s personalities...

…a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

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

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that’s not true. I write for me. I publish for money.

The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to...

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing...

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get...

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can’t make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and...

…consider yourself a functional character in someone else’s novel – a background character – a person on the street – that’s the perspective …

There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

From my writer’s workshop, “Know when it’s time to put everything you’ve got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!

Liquid quotes are more drinkable. Make your writing as fluid as possible, so people can chug it in one tasty gulp.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Respect and love your readers. Write for the reader.

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing...

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at...

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a...

Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body...

Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a...

Trust your instincts. Do not confuse ego with instinct. Ego has to be set aside if you want to improve, and we should always want to improve. There is no glass ceiling on being better.

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity’s sake, and all the better for that; the image created...

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.