As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It’s time to prove to you’re friends that you’re worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Digital distribution has widened the reading world.

Remember: Writing is drawing.

I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it’s no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took...

May it be written. May it be done.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To...

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

The best kind of happiness is a habit you’re passionate about.

You’re writing someone’s ‘future’ favorite book.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled…in a unique and inimitable way.

I don’t remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come...

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.

What do you want to write? What gets your goat? What irks you to no length? If you could change the world with words, what would they be?

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element

Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we...

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The...

You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the...

Acceptance and validation are the fuels of the future.

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words–and own passages...

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost...

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through — a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza.

Every story is entitled to have a ‘happily ever after’ ending. However, not all characters are so deserving.

The writer’s job is to free language from the prison of ideas.

Let your characters lead when you’re dancing together.

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also...

if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for...

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses...

Never fails. Every new book I write seems impossible, writes like I’m typing from dictation, edits like I didn’t write it, and finishes like I couldn’t possibly have written it.

Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!

I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.

Life is a story within a story.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for...

It smells terrible in here.’Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere...

A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal.”-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it’s only a story. That the darkness in...