It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those...

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may...

We’re all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The...

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades...

I like my writing career and it’s progression, I’d rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that...

No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness,...

Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful...

Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It...

Writing is more than a gift. It is a struggle that blesses those who see it through to the end.

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin’ 90k word novel is the hard part.

Inside” ChildrenInside each of us are the children we were at each developmental stage. With regard to our creative dreams, these inside children can prevent us from living them by “acting out” in order to...

If an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

Thee, my serenity, one can not bear, Seeing thee befuddled, bereaved,Dimmed like the midnight, secluded, darkened,Thee, my serenity,A window to my eyes, A window to laughter, and peace of mind,Thee, my serenity, one can not...

Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages.

Poetry is the beauty of life.

Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.

in the beginning was the Word,” John writes, and perhaps part of what that means is that until there is a word, there can be no beginning. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an...

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has...

I kill my loneliness by reading and (then) writing, damn.

Many people are partial to the notion that . . . all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in control. This is a variation...

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the...

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

What you think and how you think, influences what you ink and how you ink.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with...

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

It is the writer’s job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to...

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They’re just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

I wear a helmet when I write, because if you’re doing it right, writing is dangerous.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of...

The code of the coward is to run away. I know, because I wrote the manual.

They say that I am a poetI wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottleemotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle ondistant shores I am...

When you use your pen to think, you’re never wasting ink.

If we are exhorted to play simple melodies with beauty rather than difficult ones with error, the same should be applied to writing; simple words greater effect.

If you can listen to or read anything, but misspelled words offend you, raise your hadn.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He...

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is...

I’m the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of ‘somedays’. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it...

Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of...