Authors are merely the medium between the words and the page.

It’s during a storm that the best songs get written.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory...

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it...

At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of...

Give a poet a pen

A book comes and says, ‘Write me.

There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it’s because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course....

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for...

Write as if no one is going to read it.

Stick to what you know and always be true to yourself. If you do that, your writing will be true, also.

It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of...

I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as hers do.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

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...

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. ‘Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?”You know what. You know I’m going to be a ball player.”Well, I’m going to...

Ideas are cheap — making something of them is difficult

Should you care to write (and only the saints know why you should) you must needs have knowledge and art and magic – the knowledge of the music of words, the art of being artless,...

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down–impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing...

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

… endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that...

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don’t read books.

As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie… I want it to be about the...

we as authors have been writing about people we aren’t for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are...

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and...

Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I’ll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips....

My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

The best restaurants are always down the side streets.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

I can be a woman on a mission. But I’ll choose what mission that is. And that my friend is where youll see the results.

you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

Write about the emotions you fear the most.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable...

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can....

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses...

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t...

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

I can’t imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.

To be a poet in today’s technological age means to be underrated and at times, ignored. In a world where the noise of industry reigns supreme, the poet’s voice is being drowned out, but it...

…it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.