I wear the writer pants in the family.

I’m an observer. I am fascinated by people and how their minds work (and, of course, my own). Why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do – and that...

Don’t give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn’t what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what’s on the...

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.

Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the...

Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life.

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

Words made you mighty. Words, stories, books: they could take you anywhere, and they could go out anywhere in the world. Jenny — Jane — picked up her pen, and began to write.

You know you’re a mom when you open the door to the dishwasher mid-cycle and think, ‘This is the closest I’m going to get to a spa treatment till next Mother’s Day.'””Joining the words ‘Lose...

Raise the bar. Don’t duck under it.

There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

…I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write……writing is antisocial. It’s as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is...

It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without...

Literature is the ditch I’m going to die in. It’s still the thing I care most about.

Of course words are magic. That’s why they call it spelling.

The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

The only difference between writers and people who don’t write is that writers aren’t afraid to display their demons.

You’re a loner in body, mind, and soul. A writer who spends a day of solitude in the office is plagued by a mind that travels with the body. The work never stops.

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

Oh, readers. If only you knew what we’ve gone through for you.

Writing is the act of discovery.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have...

for the work.” Not for the in-dwelling editor. That bitch was impossible to please anyway.

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

If I propose to myself and myself says yes, I get to have the cake, right? I love me, so I’m thinking 12 tiers.

Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only...

The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolutely. But finding the subject and...

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

To prepare to write, I don’t surround myself with books. I surround myself with feelings.

Nothing is louder than silence.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

…the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Live first, write second.

Write to evolve and you’ll evolve to write.

Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry...

Some words may make you happy, some may make you said. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope. . . what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there’s a good chance you were not called.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it.

Los escritores compensan la falta de estímulo escribiendo para el porvenir, o mejor, para esa forma cálida del porvenir que es el reconocimiento de unos cuantos, no necesariamente amigos.

Every day we live, we are writing our own secret book.