Success does not bring happiness. Success brings success.

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work…I kept encountering a striking factoid…: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly...

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

America takes her writers too seriously.

Tattoos are a permanent commitment of passion

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know...

sometimes i wake upin the middleof the nightand findpoetry splatteredall over my bed.

People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you’re just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title.

Cowok itu jarang nulis. Sekalinya iya, ada dua kemungkinan :a. Langsung bagus dan jadi dewa (macamnya Kak Fauzi : dua dari dua buku yang aku beli mengesankan ^^. Sayang Genere Fantasy enggak dilirik orang kebanyakan)b....

I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved – from a time I...

I lose it when I can’t write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

The privilege is not writing a novel, it’s to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little,...

Writing is my life. Life is my hobby.

One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)

I feel the most alive when I write.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

It’s amazing how fast you can write when there’s a gun to your head.

The Baby Name book can be a very dangerous tool in the hands of a prolific author.

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in...

Writers haven’t got any rockets to blast off. We don’t even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven’t got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught...

No one ever does the last thing on their list.

I’m much more than a writer – I’m someone who puts different words together in an interesting way.

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with...

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the...

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as “the process of judging.” This may seem problematic to some, since…we...

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.