…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...

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky...

Creating characters is easy. It’s getting them to behave that’s the problem.

Indie publishing lets me feed my inner control freak.

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into...

Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to...

When people say, ‘you’re so young to be a writer,’ I always reply, ‘I started young because I’ve got a lot to write.

Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.

Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t...

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

Listening to Led Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling…however fleeting.

The only man she ever loved. And hated.

Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.

Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages.

George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and...