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.

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...

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

Writing an unwritten thing, read the unreadable.

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.

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: ‘Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write....

If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review...

Sometimes the things in our heads are far worse than anything they could put in books or on film!!

What about his style?” asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.”Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am...

It’s the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this...

Everyone needs time to develop their dreams. An egg in the nest doesn’t become a bird overnight.

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

I have talents that I’m not supposed to have: I can tell who crushes on who by how they stand, I can read strides, I can hear the tonal differences between an alto and a...

I wasn’t writing home. I wasn’t writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a...

People think, Hey, I love kids, I want to write children’s books. But they think children are happy. That’s their first mistake. [Messinger, Jonathan. “Guilt for dinner: The Mo Willems interview.” Hipsqueak. 5 May 2011....

[Speculating thoughts after an interview with A. A. Milne] The main point was that Mr. Milne took his writing very seriously, “even though I was taking it into the nursery,” as he put it. There...

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

My lips are fierce with passion. My heart spins fiery beats. A rhythm lives within my fingers and dances in my feet.

I just want my stories to be mine.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool of daily whirling images has...

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don’t tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

A mistake is the name we give to any action in which we perceive a difference between what we intended and what has occurred. Intention fuels every dramatic action, including the writing of dramatic stories,...

Theoretically there’s no reason one should get [writer’s block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately...

The greatest compliments I’ve ever received were complaints from readers that I made them stay up all night reading.

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader’s trust

Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the sake of my soul.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.