You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

Lineation can make your break your poems.

Never start with a clear idea of storyline. Instead, commence blindly, with a vague notion of trying to include a reference to your favourite band, gift shop, or chocolate bar.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for...

Art glows with faith even in its weakest parts. At every moment, writing is an act of self-confidence – the sheerest, most determined, most stubborn self-belief. You CAN have faith and doubt at the same...

writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all

The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.

Writing is hard. That’s why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.”[There Is No Such Thing as Writers’...

… a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: ‘Avoid them like the plague.’ Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought...

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

Whether or not you employ humor in dealing with difficult subjects, the tone of the writing is of the utmost importance. Personally, I can read about almost any subject if I feel a basic trust...

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

Living is about capturing the essence of things. I go through my life every day with a vial, a vial wherein can be found precious essential oils of every kind! The priceless, fragrant oils that...

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to...

…stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own … you can’t write a story until you’ve felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly,...

There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day’s...

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight….what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], “Tell your daughter three things.” Tell her to read…Tell...

You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe...

I can taste fear, and lies, on a man’s skin, Cavrax.” The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric’s neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. “You’re lying to me.

The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part,...

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as...

I don’t want to write soft, easy fiction; I want to write fiction that challenges.

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story...

I don’t like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody’s dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way...

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from...

Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you’re just ready to get that baby out!

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to...

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read — something most important...

Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense...

He began to write his thoughts and observations concerning the day’s events […] It helped him better understand everything he had seen and done over the course of the day.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the...

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don’t care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that...

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

I write to find out what I’m talking about.

I’d write of people and places like I knew, and I’d make my characters talk everyday English; and I’d let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the...

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”(Casual Chance, 1964)

In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That’s why writing female characters is so much fun. They’re not GUYS at all.

I know it’s difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

Survivors of the red pen can overcome the blank paper…

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud’s interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation....

Goals are dreams with a deadline.

If you can’t stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague...

You can’t eat [literature], that’s the problem,” he said. “I’ve tried, it’s very dry, and not at all nutritious.