You are not an “author,” you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you’re an author.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words...

A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true,...

I should be writing …

You don’t create a diamond by rubbing it with fluffy bunny slippers. You need to apply pressure and heat. There are enough air-headed cheerleaders out there. We need more drill sergeants.

Good fiction makes the truth believable.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease,...

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even....

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I’m a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my...

If God inspires your writing, others will know because it will inspire them when they read it.

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long,...

Meredith,’ interposed Celia, ‘makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.

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...

Jesus–if Kilgore Trout could only write!” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

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

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

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

Storytellers don’t show, they tell. I’m sticking with that.

Don’t be afraid of what you’re creating.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don’t think clearly–too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of...

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by...

Writer’s block isn’t always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer … I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in...

Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, “Come, let’s have an adventure together.

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She...

Radošs darbs nav veicams kaut kādā brīdī un pēc pavēles. Daiļnieks var strādāt tikai tad, kad jūtas aicināts! Ja vēlaties uzrakstīt kaut ko lielāku, tad jums jāiemācās iedvesmi organizēt – izsaukt pēc pavēles!… Vispirms mēģiniet...

During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about...

A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure...

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book – or any novel, now that I think about it – was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you’re at the end of the book...

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...

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller...

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer – doesn’t use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

Writing is a team sport.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie….

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played...

Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days…it will demand absolutely everything of you.

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you’re born that, you can’t change it. You’re going to do it whether you want to or not.

Der Mensch, der einen wirklich künstlerischen Eindruck empfängt, hat das Gefühl, dass er das, was ihm die Kunst enthüllt, bereits kannte, aber außer Stande war, den Ausdruck dafür zu finden.

I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that’s too much pressure and you’ll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.