I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface...

I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and...

Her maktul katilinde yaşamaya devam eder.

Para mim cada poema é um mundo próprio, um habitat bizarro de memórias, pessoas, sentimentos, conclusões. Cada verso é um retrato, um objecto precioso, um pedaço que recolho do mundo e visto com palavras. Devolver...

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline...

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Writing is like cooking. You toss in a bunch of ingredients and hope the combination of flavors will appeal to someone’s taste.

They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have...

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto...

Saber fer les coses que no es volen fer ajuda a fer bé les coses que es volen fer

Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.

The Power of the Pen is not in the color of ink it spills; but the power of the word it spells

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

sometimes i wake upin the middleof the nightand findpoetry splatteredall over my bed.

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn’t have, and I could order this environment in the way that I...

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started.

I’ve learned to let my characters speak and act the way they want to! I’ve tried to interfere but they just get angry at me and throw big rocks.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional … My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their...

Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresistible necessity to enter upon your great labour.

Editing one’s writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then,...

Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

The writer in her went silent and hid when her revealing words were wide-spread read.

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

A dear and long-time friend,… asked me, “Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?” I replied, “Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its...

Google maps are one thing but there’s no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place....

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Writing is like a mental masturbation to me.

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call...

Description is the color in the canvas of your story.

All I’m writing is just what I feel, that’s all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

Write,’ she said, ‘as if you’ll never be read. That way you’ll be sure to tell the truth.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent...

writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a...

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway…Awakening does not feed ego’s needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn’t...

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?

Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you’re an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you’re an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a...

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

It is not the task of a writer to ‘tell all,’ or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division,...

That tingle in the brain is called a word.It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.

Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.