A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don’t...

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing...

Writer’s block isn’t always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.

…I make no apology about stirring the depths – every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath …

1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one...

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling … I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt...

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to...

I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

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

I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It’s easier to dance when you finish writing.

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be...

Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains – editing, and it’s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to...

It’s basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn’t and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is...

Raise the bar. Don’t duck under it.

Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it...

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only...

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

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.

The author is impacted by a hidden insistence that takes the shape of different combinations each time adifferent text is produced but the underlying problem remains the same for him.

If the voice inside your head doesn’t sound anything like you, you might be a writer.

Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference...

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader’s imagination and intellect.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing...

Never stop writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it’s integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how...

culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that...

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can’t make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and...

…it’s not the medium that’s the message – it’s consciousness – the wonder of being able to wonder …

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the...

There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

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]