I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit–and eventually a profession–of...

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...

Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you’re constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.

A writer is a dangerous friend. Everything you say, all of your life and experience, is fodder for our writing. We mean you no harm, but what you know and what you’ve done is unavoidably...

To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.

To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who...

Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.

I do not, can not write just for money. Lord knows I haven’t made much. I write because it is what my Father has given me to do. I do not mean that He woke...

Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.

In her spare time she scribbled her thoughts, wishes and dreams, life and times. It kept her sane despite her loneliness.

Most of the people I worked with in my old job were pretty cool. We used to go out drinking after lights out and the less pleasant members of staff would be the topic of...

Writing is life, not just a ‘job’. It’s lying to communicate the truth, it’s speaking while being quiet, it’s winning and losing at the same time.

You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let...

What doesn’t kill us gives us something new to write about.

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It’s who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them,...

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life...

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

There is always, always, always something to write about.

Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it… the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing...

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you’re a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don’t experience either one of those, you’re...

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think,...

To ask how I feel about writing is to ask how I feel about breathing.

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and...

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

It’s all mine, it’s all sacred.

Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . ....

Life is a book. There are many pages to be written.

The secret of being a successful writer is–write. Every writer deserves that chance.

I just inhaled kimchi ramen. Nose on fire. Next chapter may be obscured by tears.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I’m going.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and...

Confession: I don’t want to be one of my characters. I’m mean to them sometimes. Really mean.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

It’s like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back...

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that’s why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

To say that a writer’s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it’s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer’s build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The...

To get over artist’s block, make shitty art.

Meggie Folchart: Having writer’s block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that’s right. You want to be a writer, don’t you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it’s a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it’s just...

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label — to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must...

He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossedaway from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were...

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s...

When I reach for my pen, nothing is out of reach.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!