Write as if Time will erase every word.

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all...

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.

You don’t create or write to be successful; you don’t create or paint to be famous or to increase your wealth. You do all of these things because your soul is calling you to do...

I write more with the words I leave out.

Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire.(The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.)”(Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme, 1738)

The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of...

I don’t have problems. I am a writer. I am the problem.

An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn’t have to–and indeed cannot–capture the hearts of every possible reader...

Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.

Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both...

I don’t want to re-write the same old book with the same tired techniques. I’d rather bring something new to the table that’s true to me and that people will have a genuine reaction to....

Do you write every day?’ ‘Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too....

The sane genius transforms everything that might disturb us, “the wildest dreams,” into something that is familiar and reassuring. It is his artfulness that makes us feel at home; it is the weak writer who...

You’re loco, Carlos. Insane. Totally crazy… Most guys think they’re imperfect for still being virgins past the age of seventeen.

A blind lover, don’t knowwhat I love till I write it out

[Everything you write is] not simply a collection of words, but a means of influence not to be taken lightly. Let your recipient’s emotions be the gondola, and your words, its gondolier.

Praise can be your most valuable asset as long as you don’t aim it at yourself.

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners,...

the art of reading, it occupies your mind no matter at any situation or mood you’re in..bringing you to completely different world, the enchanting world of the characters..giving you the best feeling after reading it..the...

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word:Read.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer’s [review of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the...

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and...

The imagination needs moodling,–long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.

If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

I’ll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write...

It’s like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back...

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

I dream. I write.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to...

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of...

How do I know you’re not crazy?” she asks. “How do I know you’re not the craziest dude I’ve ever met?” “You’ll have to test me out.” “You have my info,” she says. “I’ll think...

If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History...

Stop talking about it and just WRITE!

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

I’m not talented or gifted. I’m a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins