I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down...

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

I’ll only tell you what matters. And, the truth is, everything matters.

It’s not how great the ideas are. It’s about how you write them, to make them great.

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words ‘competent,’ ‘finished,’ ‘problem-free,’ fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible...

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this...

If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don’t be shown up by a baboon

Writing is the handmaiden of leadership.

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body...

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume…

I live precariously through my characters – so I want them to be loved passionately, live vibrantly, love unconditionally. Make friends they would die for – Explore unimaginable possibilities from all warps of life. And...

If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life’s blood, then I think something like this is perhaps always the case. A book you write out...

Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

I was thinking: to write and being a writer are two kind of diferrences things.To write is a please.Being a writer is about taking it as a job, as a consequency, as a responsibility. And...

I finished the [blog] post reflecting on the fact that, despite all the changes in my life, maybe I wasn’t so different after all. If I typed it, maybe I could believe it, too.

I didn’t want to be the woman who gave herself over willingly to the first man to notice her. I didn’t want to be the stupid girl in every novel who loved without question and...

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver...

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness – you’re drinking another glass of wine and you’re feeling even worse. Art doesn’t work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

History makes my mouth water – and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate...

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn’t return my phone calls; the itch...

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Most writers might as well write in invisible ink, because if what they’re writing is forgettable, it might as well be invisible too.

Write when you can’t stop writing. Read when you stopped writing!

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Writing is the art of remembering and forgetting. You must forget what you’ve already written, because if you’re dwelling on your old material you can’t write new material, and you must remember all you’ve written...

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.Then write....

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn...

This is the pen that was first used to write down these words. This is history. This happened. Now, go write your own history. But use another pen, because this one’s not only super glued...

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it’s never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you...

I started writing to get women, or rather a particular woman, and I continue writing because it’s now a compulsion.

If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest.

Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One...

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.

If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I’d probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many...

Current “literature” [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths...

Anything added can be subtracted; anything verbose can be simplified; anything missing can be found. Manuscripts are not books but negatives waiting for the fixer that turns them into prints.