Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which...

Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written–when only I can see them–from the moment when they will be read by other...

Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work – and realizing what opportunity is and what...

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard...

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world’s daytime dictionaries.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin – when we’re dancing with our own skeletons – our words might be all that’s left...

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have written even one poem if she’d had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a...

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

flavor of the wilds.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in...

I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a...

Don’t give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn’t what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what’s on the...

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters...

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it’s the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the...

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty’s name, while she may...

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons:...

The StadiumHave you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands...

Writing is fundamentally an act of insurrection.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be...

Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course,...

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed,...

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I’m going.

Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn’t stop.

…at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words – don’t know if it helped, but it made me more concrete …

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts.It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go...

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your...

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life…I have put only my talent into my works.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.

…writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the...

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Both reading and writing are experiences–lifelong– in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of...

I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try...

I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and...

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.