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....

A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential… It is a masterpiece in waiting — yours.

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and...

voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.

On Writing: “A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established.

You can’t have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don’t appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.

We’re not mad. We’re inhabited

Just write. That’s my only tip. And read. I guess that’s two.

Writing is hard. That’s why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.”[There Is No Such Thing as Writers’...

An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet… technology progression yes… style?

Find the problem, find the story.

[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.

As writers, we have an obligation to respect our readers’ time.

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the...

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...

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I’ve seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.’If you don’t -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to...

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words– not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving...

If you’re a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

… yes I speak a different language – the dark fire of poetry – it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood…

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The...

The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To...

The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and...

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have...

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible,...

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.

To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or...

What I don’t write is as important as what I write.

A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long...

manuscriptmeanuscriptmoanuscriptmanurescriptand so on

I can’t wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought...

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

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...

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the...

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. “This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends.” He stared at the paintings for...

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’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the...

Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!