An opportunity lost may have motivated us to find a satisfying alternative. Adversity or suffering may have taught us certain important skills. Some writers have felt new appreciation for their lives after surviving a serious...

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Menulis fiksi adalah menuangkan perasaan dan semangat hidup dalam untaian kata-kata di atas kertas-sebuah usaha tanpa akhir untuk mendapatkan makna-makna yang berbeda

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would...

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and...

The writer,’ said Donald Barthelme, ‘is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.’ In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in...

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.’ And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. …...

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own...

Stories are invented as you go along…

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It’s a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world...

I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think...

The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story…. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as...

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

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

I know it’s difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

Your experiences are the foundation for your story; your imagination takes it from there.

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 not a race. Is to distill the soul letter by letter in a slow and delicate process that will take years.

Writing Tip:Don’t let the “writing rules” bog you down when you’re writing the first draft; they don’t matter when you’re writing the story, only when you’re editing the story.

For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you’ve done on the book so far won’t be much comfort, because so much...

Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

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...

I only write when the spirit moves me … and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

You describe your Wonderful Night very well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the thing itself—the setting but not the...

Man nekad nav patikušas latviešu rakstības daudzās filoloģiskās palīgzīmes, kas samaitā burtu un lappuses grafisko izskatu, Tagad es šis ķekšus tieši ienīdu. Ja mūsu rakstības veidotājiem būtu vairāk estētiskās izjūtas, tie ķekšus būtu atvietojuši ar...

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

I went on steadily trying to ‘find out how to’; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote “Ethan Frome” that I...

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Build a strong foundation and you can reach even the most unthinkable heights.

Letters orchestrated into a song of words create the symphony of a novel.

I can’t wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

The only ‘ironclad rules’ in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

Kegiatan fisik dalam menulis fiksi bertolak belakang dengan hasil yang didapat. Kegiatan tersebut adalah duduk tegang dan jenuh sepanjang siang atau malam di depan meja dan mesin ketik, pada saat aku ingin berdiri dan pergi...

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

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...

The thing I’ve learned is that thinking is not writing.

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to...