I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up...

Sometimes, I marvel at the wonderof how graceful words seem to appearpen to paper; in others’ handsAnd I think to myself-oh, how obsolete my existence is,to be unable to do the same.

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you’re busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat,...

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

Arrogance kills creativity.

A writer’s work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then...

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is...

The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one’s surface interest then...

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

An intensely gripping narrative…expertly crafted and totally addictive…a must read!

I don’t want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to...

Writer’s block is when your imaginary friends won’t talk to you.

Rejection isn’t a sign of failure. Rejection is a reminder that there’s always room for improvement.

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You’ll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any...

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the...

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

If, however, the poetic end might have been as well or better attained without sacrifice of technical correctness in such matters, the impossibility is not to be justified, since the description should be, if it...

If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.

I’m an observer. I am fascinated by people and how their minds work (and, of course, my own). Why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do – and that...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

We writers are a crazy group. I can’t think of any other profession where the actual work is deep within, uncomfortable, and wanting out.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synaesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardise...

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

You can make anything out of writing.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

The usual run of children’s books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, ‘I am a swallow.’ Then I...

Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness

There is a point at which honesty becomes mischief. That’s when your writing becomes irresistible.

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode…It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should be a good reason for a character to do something outside...

Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you’ve done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes...

Everything in life is a metaphor for everything in life.” Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn’t allow one small insincerity to creep in.

Writing is the best anti-depressant.

That’s typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Keep rechewing. Like a cow. Use all your creative stomachs.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there....

Kanuni za fasihi ndiyo msingi wa maandiko yote ya kitaalamu hapa ulimwenguni. Watu hawana budi kuzifuata kanuni hizo kama wanataka kutumia vipaji vyao katika ngazi ya kimataifa.

Don’t try to write anything you can’t feel – it will be a failure – ‘echoes nothing worth

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

…all kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull …

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that’s why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.