Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next...

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song,...

Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it’s gonna please somebody else.

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you...

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story.

If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of...

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

What are you burning?” On a glance, just some papers.”I write in a journal.” He spoke below his breath, so that his words weren’t quite for me. “Because I like to see everything written down....

Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.

The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache...

if you think they didn’t go crazy in tiny rooms just like you’re doing now without women without food without hope then you’re not ready.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Poetry is not for profit. Poetry is for Posterity.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled...

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children...

I don’t write to chase away my demons ~I wield my pen as a weapon…calling those bastards to war!

If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it...

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, ‘Your style just isn’t right because you don’t use the really flowery language that romances have.’ My...

Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. “I will not Reason and Compare,” said Blake; “my business is to Create.” Besides, since you are like no other...

There’s writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time–except maybe when I’m making love.

I hope I don’t write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself “When did they live?” I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live!...

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

People who understand everything get no stories.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no...

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.

My best writing surfaces out of the need to rebel, the desire to end emotional chaos and the importance I place on embracing that independent streak inside us all that makes us want to break...

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy.

Remember that wasted minute at the start of the day? Hard luck but you’ll never find it again.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way...

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for...

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language...

Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need...

and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn’t anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Write like it matters, and it will.

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read...

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of…

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.