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,...

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...

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.

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

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!

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

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.

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.

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...