Pay attention, and use your imagination.

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...

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.

May the ink of your thoughts never dry.

Writing is like a religion to those who don’t practise, an act of faith for those who do.

May my mind be clear and my heart pure.

Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba.

Don’t say you’re a writer if you’re not writing. Even if you’re writing, don’t call yourself a writer. Say instead, ‘I write.’ It’s the verb that’s important, not the noun.

Receiving very little or no feedback from my writing I really don’t know if people like it or if they are actually reading any of my work for that matter. Still I will continue to...

I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.

Be Visionary …

The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolutely. But finding the subject and...

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

To prepare to write, I don’t surround myself with books. I surround myself with feelings.

Nothing is louder than silence.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

…the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Live first, write second.

Write to evolve and you’ll evolve to write.

Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.

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...

Some words may make you happy, some may make you said. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope. . . what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there’s a good chance you were not called.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

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

Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it.

Los escritores compensan la falta de estímulo escribiendo para el porvenir, o mejor, para esa forma cálida del porvenir que es el reconocimiento de unos cuantos, no necesariamente amigos.

Every day we live, we are writing our own secret book.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: “There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the...

In order to write about life first you must live it.

It isn’t the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original....

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything...

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.

Sometimes you have to go a little crazy before you can find sanity. I think I’m close.

Writers are born, not created.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

We all have a place within us, that would like to rewrite the way our life was written out for us….That’s why people want to become authors.

They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.

So what do you do when you are stuck?The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I’m not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday’s a comin’ prayer. When I...

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

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life...

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time...