Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a...

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the...

Sometimes you can write about a character’s day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the...

Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:

When you left you left behind a fieldof silent flowers under a sky full of unstirred clouds…you left a million butterfliesmid-silky flutters You left like midnight rain against my dreaming ears Oh and how you...

Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal....

He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an intense, statesmanlike...

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing...

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only...

Write as though your life depended on it.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I...

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much...

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a...

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake,...

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope – to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that...

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves...

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It’s the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes...

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

All writing is rewriting.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow.

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a...

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.

The only way to overcome fear and doubt is to go against them.

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...

…there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.