A writer’s courage: to leave a blank page blank.

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above...

Writing is my passion. It’s in my blood like a talent is. Like dancing, or singing, or drawing, I write. I can never stop writing. It helps me to express everything I’m afraid to talk...

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life’s life-story.

Writing has the power of permanence.

I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I...

Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.

There’s a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don’t lead a story. You follow it.

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while.

It must take a lot of self-discipline,’ she said.’Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.’ He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that ‘Dumas, I think it was Dumas,...

Like the ‘good’ characters in literature, the sane don’t have any memorable lines.

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, ‘I feel as if I have looked down a corridor...

Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

How many pages will it take to tell your story?

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in...

My books are mine, and yet they are alien to me–as a child belongs to a parent and yet has a life of its own. I can guide and hope and nudge my characters this...

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing....

great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I...

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

I can’t believe I wrote that many words in a row.

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership...

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world...

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

…the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e.,...

Everything that drowned me taught me how to swim.

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once...

A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you’ll never forget.

Listen to your inner self, it knows you best.

Here is a lesson in creative writing.First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.And I realize some of you may be...

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”[From the preface.]

If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed...

Perfect grammar–persistent, continuous, sustained–is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

…Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn’t the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn’t there more danger in ignorance than...

Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.

History tends to play games with the truth, but at least it does so with a flourish.

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.

Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living...

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

Write every day. Even if it’s only a letter.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today’s literary world; there’s precious little economic incentive to write one…

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But...

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind.