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...

What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it’s the closest thing to being God you’re ever going to...

teka muna”. Dahil pag lumagpas ang maikling panahong yon, kahit mag-umpog ka ng ulo sa pader mahihirapan ka nang maghabol.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete…you feel as if you could do anything.

Today I will find something beautiful.Delicate pink blossoms on a cherry tree.The dove resting near the lemon buds.Sunbeams smiling from sky to earth.Smiling on me.”Creating” in BREATHE IN

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There’s a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the...

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person...

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

I don’t write to chase away my demons ~I wield my pen as a weapon…calling those bastards to war!

The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire...

…I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you’re actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue …

If you’re not creating, you’re disintegrating.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a...

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut...

There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing – to find honest men to publish it – and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]

There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.

It’s all mine, it’s all sacred.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

(…) Você e Tania sugerem que eu releia e desentorte o livro. Mas eu não consigo mais entrar dentro do ambiente dele. Para mim é como ler uma coisa vazia e eu tenho que parar...

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when “there is no intrinsic authority to my words.” “I…clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in...

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

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don’t really. They choose you

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…

At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history...

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

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

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention… Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there’s pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was...

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?

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every...

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke...

I’m not talented or gifted. I’m a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

…the most beautiful things don’t always make you happy – often they make you weep…

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how...

Books most certainly don’t write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the...

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy’s circumstances it was sheer...

So what do you do when you are stuck?The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I’m not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday’s a comin’ prayer. When I...

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...

Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value...

Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.