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.

Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me – or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I...

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I...

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...

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

Don’t over edit. Don’t second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don’t get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of...

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex.” – 1946

The best thing that can happen to me when I’m writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I’m writing at all. It’s as though I enter into a kind of trance. I...

self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect...