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.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

I could not think without writing.

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian’s mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is...

It’s entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

What do you think is my favourite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. “Wuthering Heights.” Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth...

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

You were meant to write this book.

Well I want something to do, to create, to achieve, to whatever…. Something I can’t get enough of. You know something that I can’t wait to get up in the morning to do something I...

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, ‘open your mind to me and I’ll take you to another world.

In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener....

Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. ‘Lost Illusion’ is the...

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

Frustration of mind can be revel through writing something even if it will be never read.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don’t...

When I began writing stories and exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page. I thought it wouldn’t be like a...

Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.

Authors are merely the medium between the words and the page.

It’s during a storm that the best songs get written.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it...

At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of...

Give a poet a pen

A book comes and says, ‘Write me.