Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less...

Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.

But if the Busyness = Status equation works, it’s strictly because a social game has emerged wherein relatively privileged, educated people with all kinds of Choice disguise their decisions to be busy as manifestations of...

Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

How is your book doing?” or “How many copies have you sold?” are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask “What did you write today?”.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.

First time I ever put pen to paper, I had one goal – to build something no one had ever thought of before.

Writers write because they’re writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little...

If you can’t stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague...

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.

Write them all down. The mistakes and the blessings and the places you cracked in two. Write the prayers and the tantrums. The sacred and the profane. The open roads and the closed doors. Nothing...

I’m merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to...

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and...

I don’t think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules… afternoons are best, but I’m too lethargic for...

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the...

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if...

Someone asked me, ‘How do you write a book?’ I said, ‘I live with a pen in one hand.

Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden….

voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

If you are destined to become a writer, you can’t help it. If you can help it, you aren’t destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness,...

We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we’re dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

Word count doesn’t tell me when a story ends, my characters will tell me.

I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb “snuffle.

To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.

Life is too short to dwell in the negativity all the time.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully...

I write because I have to; because I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands if I didn’t.

When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, “You can do this. You’ve got what it takes.” The other sounds like my mother-in-law.

Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City…

I believe that we don’t choose our stories,” she began, leaning forward. “Our stories choose us.” She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. “And if we don’t tell...

What I don’t get about “traditional publishing” is that an author creates a work that they think is good enough to be published. They then have to spend their valuable time begging others to exploit...

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try...

You may be a serious writer if ….10. your hard drive is littered with random notes and story ideas … but not nearly as littered as your head.9. you keep pen and paper next to...

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it’s shit. Write some more. Repeat.

By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.

There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if ‘productivity’ and/or ‘usefulness’ are the measures of human value, and — particularly for...

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, “I kill people.” This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from...