Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I’d get it down on paper if I were you.

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand...

Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would...

When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

In the past few years I’ve assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people — people who supposedly want to write...

Every time you go in, it’s like starting over. You don’t know how you did the other records. You’re learning all over. It’s some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and...

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author’s thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which...

That’s the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

When you write a story, don’t just write it – live it;When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the...

I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an...

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its...

You don’t need to wait for inspiration to write. It’s easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing…

There’s more to life than writing.

It’ll be a change,” says Marcus. “Something different.””Not a mystery.”Marcus laughs. “No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history.”Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up...

Sometimes, I marvel at the wonderof how graceful words seem to appearpen to paper; in others’ handsAnd I think to myself-oh, how obsolete my existence is,to be unable to do the same.

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you’re busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat,...

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

Arrogance kills creativity.

A writer’s work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then...

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is...

Environ une demi-seconde après avoir terminé votre livre, après en avoir lu le dernier mot, le lecteur doit se sentir envahi d’un sentiment puissant; pendant un instant, il ne doit plus penser qu’à tout ce...

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can’t manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

everything are in writing, except one true eyesight

Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

Remember William Blake who said: “Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told...

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were...

The other night we talked about literature’s elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated “dose” of life. I said, almost indignantly, “That’s the danger of it, it prepares you to live,...

Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy.

I think the reason why I don’t read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand...

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank...

In my poetry a rhymeWould seem to me almost insolent.Inside me contendDelight at the apple tree in blossomAnd horror at the house-painter’s speeches.But only the secondDrives me to my desk.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

I lose it when I can’t write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.