Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it’s never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.

I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an...

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its...

You don’t need to wait for inspiration to write. It’s easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing…

There’s more to life than writing.

It’ll be a change,” says Marcus. “Something different.””Not a mystery.”Marcus laughs. “No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history.”Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up...

Sometimes, I marvel at the wonderof how graceful words seem to appearpen to paper; in others’ handsAnd I think to myself-oh, how obsolete my existence is,to be unable to do the same.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you’re busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat,...

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

Arrogance kills creativity.

A writer’s work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

Really good writing has purpose and that purpose should be to shape other minds to desire truth and a more noble purpose in life and to become more thoughtful and knowledgable about important things like...

The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then...

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a...

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is...

Environ une demi-seconde après avoir terminé votre livre, après en avoir lu le dernier mot, le lecteur doit se sentir envahi d’un sentiment puissant; pendant un instant, il ne doit plus penser qu’à tout ce...

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can’t manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the...

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

everything are in writing, except one true eyesight

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

You can never know enough about your characters

Remember William Blake who said: “Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told...

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were...

Of course I do. But I always feel guilty when that happens. After all, my journal is the oldest and most loyal friend I have. And it never interrupts me when I’m speaking,” he added,...

The other night we talked about literature’s elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated “dose” of life. I said, almost indignantly, “That’s the danger of it, it prepares you to live,...

Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy.

I think the reason why I don’t read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand...

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank...

In my poetry a rhymeWould seem to me almost insolent.Inside me contendDelight at the apple tree in blossomAnd horror at the house-painter’s speeches.But only the secondDrives me to my desk.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

I lose it when I can’t write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.”(Interview, The...

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I’ve seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.’If you don’t -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to...