Without living, how can you know? Without knowing, how can you speak?

There is something about just setting the pen to paper that lifts me and helps to focus my energy and thoughts.

About writing:The trick is to make sure you love what you’ve produced–to Believe..in order to convince.

For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was...

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides,...

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or...

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Advance Notice”)

Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

For a writer it’s a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what’s available and who gets to read it.

When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to...

When you’ve worked hard and done well and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you.

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to...

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth — and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

For readers worldwide, the attraction of romance novels seems to be that they provide hope, strength, and the assurance that happy endings are possible. Romance makes the promise that no matter how bleak things sometimes...

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t...

A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.

Is this not the reason I write, to leave a piece of me behind?

Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it

I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in...

All plots are cliche.

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the...

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning...

I’ve always known that the best part of writing occurs before you’ve picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it’s only when you start pinning words...

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then...

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape...

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

We, and I think I’m speaking for many writers, don’t know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day,...

The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn’t be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any...

File under “Hard Truths”: the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness.

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words...

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

When I’m writing, I’m waiting to see somebody, and I’m waiting to hear them. It’s almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

There are authors who write to communicate, there are authors who write to impress themselves.

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with...

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

But what I hope for in a book – either one that I write or one that I read – is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don’t want to think of...