From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: “There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection,...

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”3) Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4)...

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line ‘Don’t palm all your abuses [of language upon me]’ was possibly too rude. ‘It’s in the book,’ I said. He didn’t hit me.

Author? Author? Did you write these legs?”Yes.”‘Well, I don’t like dem. I don’t like ’em at all at all. I could ha’ writted better legs meself.

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, … I was there on the page

Poems are invisible flowers on my skin.

I write for the thirteen year old me who hated reading and craved something different than the boring literature I was forced to read for school. I write to see something I want to read...

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave...

The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a...

I had thrived in Miss Popham’s class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best...

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

You are a writer. You just need to write.

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our...

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do...

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has...

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

I’ve decided I don’t like books that end with ‘The End’. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I...

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and...

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.

The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.

I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of...

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors....

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going...

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in ‘Dracula’ is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done;...

He has caught me using the word “literally” where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot possibly reprobate more severely than I do myself.

I write because writing is power. Writing is creation. When you write, you are as a god, a deity wielding his pen like some Harry Potter staff, making whatever you want to happen, happen. By...

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns...

When people talk to themselves they should listen more. That’s how writers are born.

Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”Carrie Fisher: “I did masses of opiates religiously.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai

Hal lain yang menghalangi produktivitas ialah pujian kritisi. Pujian itu bagai menantang saya, agar saya menulis yang nilainya sama dengan apa yang terbaik telah saya tulis selama ini.

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.