but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that...

BIG books are better. There, I said it and it’s true. 

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn’t mind.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn’t worth your time — life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, “when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair’s off to one side and I feel like I’ve...

Seperti apakah Anda? Menurut saya, paling tidak Anda adalah apa yang Anda tulis.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

A true writer cuts their heart open and lets it bleed all over the page… ~Cynthia Batten

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles’ and cousins’ books, tablets and capsules and powders…and then one day...

I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater,...

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

I really do literally put myself into a character’s shoes.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

A folktale without a moral is merely a whimsy.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and...

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code … a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court?...

When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I sleep. And when I can’t sleep I write.

The pen is mightier than the sword unless it’s a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.

Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require...

My writing, it’s all I have. Well, aside from my health. And shelter, food, and clothing. Oh, and my cat.

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing–maybe one of the best things about literature. It’s always an adventure...

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep...

My advice is to write during commercial breaks, and read while your favorite TV show is on mute.

He enjoyed reading and writing. He liked words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t...

If it’s fiction, then it better be true.

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she’s one of America’s great unpublished novelists. Over the years she’s written forty-two romantic novels, none of...

Still not sure about how easily he could be integrated into their posse, Trevor smiled in delighted relief at how tolerantly two of his close friends had received his new identity.

Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, ‘is a very bad novel’, it has to be reworked through the writers’ suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting...

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in...

Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose...

Words have weight.

Haven’t I told you scores of times, that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the...

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane...

Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean...