Words have weight.

Haven’t I told you scores of times, that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the...

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane...

Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean...

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be...

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all...

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in...

I won’t sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That’s that.

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure.

Writing is like baking cupcakes, you’re trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes it’s flour and eggs and stuff, and with books it’s ideas and words. The end result is the same...

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she...

Speak up and speak clearly. I want to hear what you have to say because it matters. Let’s listen to each other and respect one another’s opinions. Although, they may be different, wisdom allows us...

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with...

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

Don’t just read to read. Read to understand.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make...

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you’re capable of.

…at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It’s only...

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly...

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It’s like an...

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother’s generation.

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing – lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.”(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

Let’s unwrite these pages and replace them with our own words

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show...

You learn almost as much about a thinker from what he reads—in particular, what he likes and what he disdains—as from what he writes himself.

I’ve found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It’s possible to make a connection with any kind of writing – as long as the writing is good.

Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are...

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize...

Vigorous writing is concise.

Storytellers are individuals who enjoy creating a holiday for the mind.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Every writer in the history of the world has been afraid to put words on the page. But we only remember those who overcame that fear.

But what all these responses have in common is that they point to the decisive power of information and stories […]

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules… afternoons are best, but I’m too lethargic for...

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters...

Do you have an audience in mind when writing? (March 2010 Bookgeeks interview)In terms of story, the only audience I have in mind is me. I’m very much aware that I can’t please everyone when...

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt...

And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I...

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.