The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the...

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza...

One of the best partners in writing?A cat!

Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look...

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought...

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it –...

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

Work. Don’t Think. Relax.

The desire to write grows with writing.

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Even your sweetest character has claws, no matter how well they may be retracted and hidden (hidden even from herself).

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James,...

Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.

If you want things to change, you must change. If you want things to get better, you must get better.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words...

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much...

Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that...

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Lost Mustache. Please do not feed. If found, contact Mouth,” and I left my phone number. Nobody’s called. Perhaps the neighborhood cat lady took it in and is petting it on her lap at this...

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of...

I decided to write this piece because my internal critic told me to write it. At least I think he told me to write it. You see, he only speaks French, and I don’t speak...

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.

I want to type one of my books into a free online translation website, and convert it from English to German and then publish the results as an exercise in the absurd.

If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.

A picture with one word on it is like a thousand-and-one-word piece of literature. At this rate, I should be done with my million-word novel in about 999 minutes.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the...

I write because I have to write; but I also write because there’s somebody out there, hopefully, who will read it.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

I’m against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I’d almost prefer the word ‘craftsman’. He’s like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who...

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider...

You can be a writer who doesn’t read everyday. But you’re not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is...

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture,...

[Henry] James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a...

Reshuffllng of thoughts – facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!

If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.