The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can’t. I don’t know what to say. I’m lost in all this sadness, and so are they.

I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there’s nothing quite like it. I...

Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you’ll ever be published or paid or even that you’ll be able to finish the particular work you’ve begun. It...

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

I write because, if I don’t, my characters will murder me in my sleep.

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep’s:...

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams’ types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights...

I’m still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won’t have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely...

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It’s the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your...

President Bartlet: There’s a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn’t think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they...

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

I’m a drinker with writing problems.

Lewis had said that there is no creativity de novo in us—that we are all sub-creators pirating and rearranging portions of reality. I agreed. But it was only an idea. And then it took on...

Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a...

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

People always try to make self-published authors feel insignificant. I have more respect for self-published authors, because I know the adversity they faced. They didn’t just write a manuscript, query letter, and blam book deal....

I enjoy creating characters, telling lies, having freedom, being myself, challenging perspectives, arguing, creating something everlasting, following in hero footsteps, making readers cry or laugh and occasionally scaring the dinner out of people.

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep...

A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write …

Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase ‘Timey-wimey...

Fear will do one thing and one thing only: hold you back

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible…Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced...

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and withoutcharacter and plot, no book can survive.

Write what you know. Write what you can’t forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope.

…The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn’t seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that...

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes...

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king...

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Definition of rock journalism: People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read.

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest.

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in...

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.

Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three….

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the...

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.