I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness – you’re drinking another glass of wine and you’re feeling even worse. Art doesn’t work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate...

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn’t return my phone calls; the itch...

Most writers might as well write in invisible ink, because if what they’re writing is forgettable, it might as well be invisible too.

Write when you can’t stop writing. Read when you stopped writing!

Writing is the art of remembering and forgetting. You must forget what you’ve already written, because if you’re dwelling on your old material you can’t write new material, and you must remember all you’ve written...

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.Then write....

This is the pen that was first used to write down these words. This is history. This happened. Now, go write your own history. But use another pen, because this one’s not only super glued...

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

I started writing to get women, or rather a particular woman, and I continue writing because it’s now a compulsion.

If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One...

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I’d probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many...

Current “literature” [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Anything added can be subtracted; anything verbose can be simplified; anything missing can be found. Manuscripts are not books but negatives waiting for the fixer that turns them into prints.

The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough...

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.

Writing is like sausage making in my view; you’ll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what’s gone into it.

Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] … It’s unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a...

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

The thing I’ve learned is that thinking is not writing.

Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

Enmerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a...

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author’s ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Never be someone’s filler chapter.

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be...

They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend...

I have so often been asked the question: “But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?” And my answer has always been: “It was God’s will that I should.” And to you...

Sometimes a book isn’t a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it’s the only story you knew how to tell.

Putting pen to paper without first deciding the route and pace at which to scribe is like setting off on a bicycle without first checking the tyres.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill....

The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one’s mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that...

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman’s erotic force something that male storytelling can never...

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose….it made the stories look on the surface like ‘a...

Edinburgh is alive with words.

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.