The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It’s in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

Revenge is a dish best served published!

Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you’re young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have...

Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best… life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo...

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent...

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be ‘and,’ ‘the,’ and ‘I,’ and ‘it,’ and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot...

Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.

Writing an unwritten thing, read the unreadable.

Sometimes when I’m writing, I wonder if the words have a mind of their own, and if they’re really just using me as a puppet to manifest themselves.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation… If one is to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of...

Just because you’re breathing, doesn’t mean you’re alive.

My pen beats faster as I write with my heart

Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

When you write, you are telling a story…to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself…over and over again.

Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.

Toby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, “Hi. Thanks for writing me!

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of...

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a...

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.

Our job as writers is to be as curious as a child, to see things for the first time, and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story...

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages,...

You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it...

To talk of many things:Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—”I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.

I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Writers write because they’re writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little...

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly...

For me, creative energy is like an old-fashioned ground-water well. When the well is dry, it’s dry. I can dig all I like, and all I’ll get for my pains is sore hands, some very...

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it’s also a cure for melancholy.

Finishing a book has massive implications for the writer, an empty head and an empty bank account springs to mind.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way,...

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

…there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and...