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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

I write because that is what I am supposed to do.

in the beginning was the Word,” John writes, and perhaps part of what that means is that until there is a word, there can be no beginning. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an...

Writing is like a blind man building a stone house with a limited amount of space and time. Brick after brick, row after row, feeling his way round and round. Turning stones into walls, rooms...

Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

Beware of being only a writer.

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

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...

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses....

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. “This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends.” He stared at the paintings for...

New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.

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