The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis’s Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win...

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I’m using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have...

I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you...

a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

… and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself...

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk...

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they...

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them...

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth. But all of that is nothing if those words fail to...

Writer’s Block is just an excuse by people who don’t write for not writing.

It is strange to hear my wordsRead back to me.I don’t think I wrote themTo have them ever leave the page.I think I only writeWhat happens across my brainWhen my feet are too weary To...

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and...

Truthfully, there’re only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won’t care if you’re happy, only if you’re miserable like they are. They eat that shit...

Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between...

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Writers are archeologists of themselves.

Love isn’t in a hurry like a flurry of flowery words on paper. It’s lush and slow to grow its aroma in the garden of time.

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I...

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Of course, you cannot just blurt out a quote whenever you feel like it. For a quote to have the desired effect, it must be properly introduced.

The unconscious fabric of human destiny had done with her, unraveling all her grievances and reweaving them as joyous circumstance.

The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and...

Hard writing makes easy reading.

There is only one rule for writing and that is go ahead and start writing.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Like madness is the glory of life.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Saepa stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturas. (Turn the stylus [to erase] often if you would write something worthy of being reread.)

I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those...

You don’t know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot...

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.

I’ve never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that’s enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It’s in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

It’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don’t even want to use language you and I know or can...

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find...