Murphy is a writer’s best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he’ll steal the silver.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Tell him I said that he will know when he’s my age that books aren’t written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go...

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves – that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives – experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time...

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village...

I am often asked by editors, fans, friends about what I read or which authors influence my writing. My answer seems surprising to them, for people expect names and quotes from me, while I give...

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I...

Writer’s block, I just drove around it four times. All my favorite writers live there.

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

My name is Yogurt Vonnegut, and I write with a spoon.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

You can’t write with dry ink. Likewise, using another author’s dried words to make your writing more fluid is not only dishonest, but it’s against everything I stand for as a former lifeguard.

Being a writer means expressing with passion your imagination, nightmares, dreams, experiences and reality through words on paper. You are a successful writer when readers criticize, get emotionally affected by, and praise your written work....

Love allows us to remember the joy, and forget the pain. That’s why I write things down, to help me remember.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in...

I am writing history, and I can’t be there.

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully...

Fear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Let’s see if I can write about something other than my heart.

It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

A true writer should be able to write about any color. It’s the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.

It’s more important to be read than paid.

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

I would write a thousand foolish things that one might be to the point, if only it might make us praise God more.

You should edit before and after editing.

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it — if not better. I’ve...

Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it’s eaten in the author’s belly.

what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opinion.”[Thick Skin and Bad Reviews, Blog post, June 26, 2013]

His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely...

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it’s because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and...

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It’s not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as...

The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.

Writing things was important, wasn’t it? Nakata asked.’Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only author who intends to take the longest possible route to a destination that will always be over the next hill.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to...

She doesn’t quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still...

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.