We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes...

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Religion is your idea of leading life, the value you not only hold close to your heart but ones that you practice, the passions in your life, the faith in your ideals, the vision you...

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

If there’s a will, there’s a way!I feel larger than LIFE–and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders….as my fingers tap on my computer late...

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn...

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it’s never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you...

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.

Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.

Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn’t work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.Sit down, and write.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets — dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths...

…there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you’re good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he’s not important anymore, and the Internet...

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your...

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.

I think that I had better go, Holmes.””Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

Writing well means never having to say, “I guess you had to be there.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason...

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...

An imagination submitted to the movement of the Holy Spirit is a powerful tool in the hands of God to write testaments of His glory.

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart.Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master...

Work, love, courage and hope,Make me good and help me cope!

There is no such thing as an “aspiring writer”. You are a writer. Period.

Be careful what you say and do around a writer. Your words and actions may become material.

There is no fact or fiction, only imagined truths.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand...

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the...

Don’t you know that every writer feels that way? Fear is part of the job.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or...

I’ve probably put my 10,000 hours into writing, but I believe writing well is also greatly influenced by certain intangibles like mood and inspiration.

The ultimate goal of writing is forgiveness.

It’s easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best...

There’s two kinds of women–those you write poems about and those you don’t.