The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector’s item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in...

Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.

Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they...

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

To describe an emotion is to feel with words. To communicate a moment of existence is to bridge the eternal and the temporal with an intellectual engagement of body, soul, spirit, and mind. To write,...

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

Journal writing Helps Us Heal. That’s one of the therapeutic methods to helping us cope with hardship or painful situations in our lives. Writing in a journal allows us to make sense of things and...

…Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you’re a teenager—and even when you’re older—lots of people will try to tell you what...

I writeNotFor the sake of gloryNot For the sake of fameNotFor the sake of successBut for the sake of my soul

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often...

I intend all my characters must escape from impossible situations; if they are not in trouble, then as a writer, I am.

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?

When a day goes by and I haven’t written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful...

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with...

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under...

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out.Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is...

I say I write to you, but, truth be told, I prefer the American idiom: I write you. I’ll write you friends say, as if, in writing, someone could be caused to appear, as if...

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells...

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience....

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

As every writer knows… there is something mysterious about the writer’s ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is ‘hot’, an invisible wall seems to fall away,...

I write because I must. It’s not a choice or a pastime, it’s an unyeilding calling and my passion.

You can be taught to write – you can’t be taught to be an artist

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

…you mean you don’t fit characters into a plot? excatly…

You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.

There are more writers who read than readers who write.

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

I like to make blank pages darker. It’s this thing I do.

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.

I learn my world through writing.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing...

My friend says she’s smart. She reads a book to fall asleep.

Just because we’re fictional characters doesn’t mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.–the people of Lake Woebegon

When I sit down to write I actually ask myself, ‘Who do you want to be today?’

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.