Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write...

I’m my characters’ galley slave.

All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete…you feel as if you could do anything.

I just write whenever I can.

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able...

Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) … it’s that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader’s heart.

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.

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling … I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt...

The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one’s curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present...

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

You could say, in a way, that I’m not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? … I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that’s all.

If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don’t think of anything new. Put ’em in. Make a big mess.

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn’t allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me....

…and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be...

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it’s least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

You gotta dig through the shit to get to the gold.

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

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.

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one – for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best...

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit...

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your...

Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.

Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.”(“The Castle”)

I can fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank page.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

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

Remember, it’s called ‘character development’ for a reason – it takes time, patience and understanding to build a fictional person.

Inspiration can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be quite fickle … If you want to be able to call on inspiration reliably then you need to work on it with regularity. Someone...

Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

If your writing doesn’t keep you up at night, it won’t keep anyone else up either

Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so...

A writer will always be a writer. It’s not a choice, it’s a destiny.

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur…These factors–the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion...

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It’s easier to dance when you finish writing.