So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode…It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should be a good reason for a character to do something outside...

Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you’ve done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes...

Everything in life is a metaphor for everything in life.” Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn’t allow one small insincerity to creep in.

Writing is the best anti-depressant.

That’s typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Keep rechewing. Like a cow. Use all your creative stomachs.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there....

Kanuni za fasihi ndiyo msingi wa maandiko yote ya kitaalamu hapa ulimwenguni. Watu hawana budi kuzifuata kanuni hizo kama wanataka kutumia vipaji vyao katika ngazi ya kimataifa.

Don’t try to write anything you can’t feel – it will be a failure – ‘echoes nothing worth

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

…all kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull …

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that’s why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

…in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality...

Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

[W]e wouldn’t want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin...

Above all things — read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If...

You ask me why I don’t speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill’Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it’s...

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t...

I’ve finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what’s it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed

All you need is coffee, some cigarettes, and a Twitter account and your writing career begins! How far you go is determined by the followers you call friends.

Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn’t have needed to write a whole novel about it.

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire...

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

I earn the magic of words by writing.I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

We need writers who fear nothing. (“Our Goal”)

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we...

Write it down and it will come alive.

When you’re writing, you’re creating something out of nothing … A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.”[As quoted on WritersServices, 6 March 2012]

The pleasures of being a novelist are many. But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally...

She used to write all the time,’ Elizabeth explained, ‘before she lost all that weight. Remember? When she was the butt of everyone’s jokes instead of the girl all the boys want to date?

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts… for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and...

People tell me I look like my father. I’ve never seen my dad, so does that mean I look invisible?

Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.

Writing comes from the fear of failure not from the joy of winning.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

To say that a writer’s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it’s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer’s build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The...

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a...