Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.

That’s why I’ve just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There’s not a book here, Lawford, that hasn’t at least a glimmer of the real thing...

I think that thinking of our material universe, the one we perceive with our sense, as the only thing is not only foolish, it is arrogant. As well as, if I may add, in contradiction...

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Stomach.” I wrote it with alphabet soup, and then edited it with a can of chicken noodle soup.

When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.

Instead of reciting her an original love poem using words, I think I’ll use my tongue to more creatively explore the deepest parts of her.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of...

Are you kidding? No one is going to want to read this drivel” and keep on going. You’re going to revise and revise and then revise again anyway.

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on...

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

When you imagine it, feel it, then write it – creation is inevitable.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back...

Never ever forget that you enlisted in the ranks – you weren’t press ganged or drafted. Nobody owes you anything – least of all respect for your work – until you’ve earned it with what...

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” [Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing,...

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: “There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection,...

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”3) Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4)...

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line ‘Don’t palm all your abuses [of language upon me]’ was possibly too rude. ‘It’s in the book,’ I said. He didn’t hit me.

Author? Author? Did you write these legs?”Yes.”‘Well, I don’t like dem. I don’t like ’em at all at all. I could ha’ writted better legs meself.

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, … I was there on the page

Poems are invisible flowers on my skin.

I write for the thirteen year old me who hated reading and craved something different than the boring literature I was forced to read for school. I write to see something I want to read...

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave...

The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a...

I had thrived in Miss Popham’s class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best...

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

You are a writer. You just need to write.

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured – we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our...

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do...

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has...

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

Sometimes, God doesn’t send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.

I’ve decided I don’t like books that end with ‘The End’. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I...

Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus...

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.