Sometimes I don’t even know why I’m writing what I’m writing…I’m just following these people around and taking notes.

A writer’s goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity …

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to...

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet,...

You are not eternal. Leave an eternal mark.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you...

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending.

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking...

Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.

What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer’s mind below the surface? They’d think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see...

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.

The music lets me see the story but the story doesn’t let me write the words.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Not everyone will like what you write but there’s a certain group who’ll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do...

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a...

The p’int of good writing is to know when to stop.

When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.

Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

I’m not gonna lie…sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.

Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society...

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who...

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I’d probably miss if I stayed straight. But I’m neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill...

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers’ circles and at summer schools,...

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

Writing is like making love. Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

I am content when writing short stories.

There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper…

I read so I might live a thousand lives in a lifetime. I write to control the particulars in those lives.

A novelist’s job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time,...

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

What fascinates me about writing is wrestling thought into reality and creating a new world that is forever.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant...

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I transform “Work” in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real “Work” – of writing.) for: the “Work” by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love,...

I’m a Texas girl, with a California soul.

When the last dime is gone, I’ll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

If you only enjoy the journey of writing, that’s reward enough.

You don’t have to take it out on my typewrite ya’ know. It’s not the machine’s fault that you can’t write. It’s a sin to do that to a good machine.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can’t write, can surely review.

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her...

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about...