This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper...

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, ‘Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can’t forget me, there’s...

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on...

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Maybe that’s when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I’ve something to say when I’ve thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that...

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of...

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a...

Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly...

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in...

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Skulle det vara roligt, det där att skriva? Det visste han inte om han tyckte. Efter fem koppar te, två soppåsar med hopknycklade papper och en väldig massa kliande i håret med en nyvässad blyertspenna,...

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.

…ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the...

Working on it.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

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

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course,...

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to...

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut—swallows me up like so...

Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it’s eaten in the author’s belly.

Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel; in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of...

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits...

Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul…you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn’t snap.

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of...

I have often believed the pen to be a needle, and ink to be a thread. Each story is an intricately woven tapestry and with each word I invariably sew a piece of myself into...

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue–the clue–lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and...

You don’t teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand...

(Live + Think) x Different = Write Different

A writer who’s afraid to express their opinions is not a writer – they’re just a person with a pen.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that’s why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down...

Let’s have lunch.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; it’s just that as I...

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost...

Do what you love…

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

…writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth …

Steven wrote to me today, saying, ‘Don’t you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!!!”‘ Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries...

When I sleep tonight I dream of what I will imagine tomorrow.