I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and...

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an...

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real...

A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college…Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection...

Her love of words is a private passion – one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they...

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Writing begins as a solitary obsession and ends up as communication.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. […] The truth is that when an author begins to write for...

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me...

I am grateful to all my readers; you inspired me to keep writing.

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Jack Kerouac died after throwing up blood. The malt liquor. Then that other guy who shot his wife in the head. Burroughs somebody. And I wonder about literary figures. They’re all drunk and staggering and...

When someone gives you advice, just ask them to give it in writing and they will either keep mum or will run from there.

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t...

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn’t go away is the one to pay attention to.

Writing’s funny, it’s like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered...

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose....

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows...

Bill Bryson’s is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society.

Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal’.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.

The best kind of writing is that which comes from the authors soul.

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses....

You will do well not to write for money, not because you won’t get rich doing it, but because writing fueled by that sort of motivation becomes dull and lifeless and mediocre.

What’s so great about writing?” “You can make anything true

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill...

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat...

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. … how to set yourself spinning?

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.”[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

Put the baby on the paper.

A shrink and a patient in a love-hate relationship. Who is REALLY the boss?

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence–...

In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the...

Writing gives me wings.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds...

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole,...

Yet as the days went by and the pains in my feet subsided, I began to look back on my little adventure with a hint of fondness. When it comes to memories, it seems we...

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Most people keep their dreams to themselves, afraid to follow their hearts. Writers make their dreams a reality with each word, each line that flows from their pen.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.