From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless …...

When I write, I don’t translate for white readers…. Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we’re able to read him. If I’m specific, and I don’t overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

If you treat your characters like people, they’ll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the...

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen … Perhaps it can’t be done without the poet, but it certainly can’t be...

I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many...

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I’m concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I’ve never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my...

Using my nipples as bait, I went fishing for compliments. I got a few bites, but nothing to write about in Field & Stream.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as...

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Tell the story that’s been growing in your heart, the characters you can’t keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that...

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

When I write…I am in the fond armsof a childhood friendupon whose colorful heart I can hang the charcoal drawingsof my woes.

Read and write. That’s the recipe for being a writer.

Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It’s harsh and sometimes gritty, but it’s real. Why should we tip toe around that?

Readers are the glue that binds the books together.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Writing a novel is like having a dream.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only...

The thing that worries me is that I’m so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature – well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy...

All raw, uncooked, protesting.”(on Aldous Huxley)

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

I’ve always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the...

Mad House”)

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, “weaving fearful vision” … A frustrated poet...

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and...

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an...

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real...

A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college…Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection...

Her love of words is a private passion – one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they...

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.