Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out...

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...

Every book I’ve read appears in my writing.

What do you do when your head – your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?You focus on the really good ones!

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it’s...

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room…

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective...

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel...

All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

It is a long journey, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Take nothing and no one for granted, be humble always, be kind especially when it’s difficult and never forget the...

Lost in New York City. Not that I don’t know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing…. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the...

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…The way...

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I’d be staring at a blank page forever.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not...

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

My best writing surfaces out of the need to rebel, the desire to end emotional chaos and the importance I place on embracing that independent streak inside us all that makes us want to break...

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean they can’t behave like decent human beings.

Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

… I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

I refuse to give up when things go wrong because there is always a sliver lining behind the cloud.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn’t work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won’t find...

Replace your old books with the book you’ve always wanted to write.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.

Discovering Distilled Creativity”Amazing how sitting down to listen with no distractions – no tv, no devices, no radio – can enhance your life; the sigh of the wind the only ambient noise. Then, in that...

I don’t think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don’t think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that’s what he...

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.

I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and then when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself...

It’s better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.