I wrote when I was scared. It was all I knew to do- writing. It kept my fears firmly on the white paper before me rather than running loose around my head.

If you’re a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

Sometimes it’s impossible to say certain things … Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

Just start the sentence…and see what happens. This is how we write.

When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go...

i want to bleed ink and shit prose.

Don’t put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family’s life have been enriched by this. I...

It’s not given even to the greatest writers to tell someone else’s story.

A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering...

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress…Actually,...

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a ‘writer’, and a talentless mediocrity!People...

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go...

You either have to write or you shouldn’t be writing. That’s all.

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to...

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot...

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can’t. I don’t know what to say. I’m lost in all this sadness, and so are they.

I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there’s nothing quite like it. I...

Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you’ll ever be published or paid or even that you’ll be able to finish the particular work you’ve begun. It...

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

I write because, if I don’t, my characters will murder me in my sleep.

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep’s:...

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams’ types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights...

I’m still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won’t have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely...

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It’s the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your...

President Bartlet: There’s a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn’t think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they...

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

I’m a drinker with writing problems.

Lewis had said that there is no creativity de novo in us—that we are all sub-creators pirating and rearranging portions of reality. I agreed. But it was only an idea. And then it took on...

Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a...

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

People always try to make self-published authors feel insignificant. I have more respect for self-published authors, because I know the adversity they faced. They didn’t just write a manuscript, query letter, and blam book deal....

I enjoy creating characters, telling lies, having freedom, being myself, challenging perspectives, arguing, creating something everlasting, following in hero footsteps, making readers cry or laugh and occasionally scaring the dinner out of people.

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep...

A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write …

Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase ‘Timey-wimey...

Fear will do one thing and one thing only: hold you back