One’s writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it’s all up; you may as well throw it away and begin...

Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will...

When you’ve got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I’d write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the...

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories....

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. ‘Theme for a novel: The contrary pull … ” No. If this notion were real, he needn’t make...

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It’s like I’m writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

Writers haven’t got any rockets to blast off. We don’t even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven’t got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught...

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in...

What you should actually be trying to figure out is how to tell your story. The one that is every bit as unique to you as your fingerprints.This is the truly amazing feat because you...

Well, Betsy,” he said, “your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith’s trunk for a desk. That’s fine. You need a desk. I’ve often noticed how much you like to write....

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw...

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that...

But you can’t fault me on my footnotes. I’ve worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of...

Show me the contract.

There’s a darkness to everyone, you just have to let it out to see the world in new eyes.

Writing is the voices inside our heads, our minds, the creativity that exists for us to, from nothing, create alternate worlds, manipulate a personality or to introduce a new kind of love, a new kind...

Don’t you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at...

The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place.

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and...

Writing isn’t about creating perfect characters. There’s no such thing. It’s about creating characters that are real; flawed– yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn’t make them weak;...

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t...

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say… *shakes head* Nah, I just can’t do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I...

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity…edit one more time!

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can’t make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and...

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat.” “Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me.” “But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?

For a lot of people, their first love is what they’ll always remember. For me it’s always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a...

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves.

If you are willing to expose your heart…being publicly private, you just may do something…

I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions.

Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go...

Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people’s words, not my own–my words are gone.

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at...

The novel cannot submit to authority.

Most of us are pseudo-scholars…for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as...

Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the...

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.