You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how...

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

Write like a motherfucker.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

I can’t teach you how to write, and anybody who says they can is full of shit.

He [Augustine] admitted: ‘I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.’

That’s why I wanted to be a writer – because someone I loved told me I could be one.

Procrastination is opportunity’s natural assassin.

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your...

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same...

If the voices in your head make you cry, you’re a lunatic. Put their words on paper, and you’re a writer.

Whenever there’s something wrong with your writing, suspect that there’s something wrong with your thinking.

I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it’s in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what’s underneath. I’m as random as I can be and as responsible...

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

Roasted Roadkill and Hitchhiker’s Surprise” (this recipe is a secret concoction handed down from my great grandfather to my grandfather, who told it to my dad just before he ran him over).

Fall makes me think that if I fail horribly at this art thing, and then fail horribly with this writing thing, I’ll go run a pumpkin patch.

I’m a miner, and I’m always dirty, because I’m constantly digging. Am I shoveling for gold? Hardly. I’m unearthing this hearty land searching for the next great American novel. If I dig deep enough, I’m...

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Your writing can be chosen by one publisher and hated by all readers, or it can be rejected by one publisher and loved by all readers. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between, but...

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.

Conversations.” Of course, it’s all talk at this point.

Someone said that once a family producers a writer, that’s the end of the family.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma…

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning...

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read ‘difficult’ or ‘dark’ novels like the ones he wrote. With the...

I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let...

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Even in the hottest fire there’s a bit of water. my The Opposite Of Magic.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself;...

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”[Writer’s Digest, September 1961]

Never stop doing your best just because one person doesn’t give you credit.

Write about a terrible experience until you find value in having gone through it. Then you will appreciate every dark hour.

Believe in your characters with all your heart, & they will believe in you. Only then will they trust you enough to reveal themselves. -RCSJR

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar.

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.

If you are destined to become a writer, you can’t help it. If you can help it, you aren’t destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness,...

…he was after all, a novelist…and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into...

the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that...

You like to write. It’s the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.