I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those...

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

Rakstīšana vislabāk veidoties zināmos burzmas apstākļos. Šo apgalvojumu esmu dzirdējis no tik daudziem intellektuāļiem, ka tas man jau sen ir apnicis… Saprotams, es tam neticu.

Writing is more than a craft; it is a way of life. Everything you see or do becomes part of what you write.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness....

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

And what about those [writers’ workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter’s story, someone...

In my opinion it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism....

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...

in the mood” to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write....

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be...

The hard part is putting one word after another.

Good writing ain’t necessarily good reading.

…ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the...

I’m not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can...

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.