Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It’s a schizophrenic business.

I’m sorry to hear you’re jobless.” I need to network with people who encounter letters on a daily basis in math equations, not romantic poetry.

This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.I send you…A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you’ve ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to...

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…

You can’t edit a blank page

String several words together in a sentence and you have a language necklace. My I love you would look great with your favorite red dress.

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search...

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t...

All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen.

The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves.

It is the kernel of truth in every story that makes its writing beautiful beyond standards.

Somebody once asked me where I come up with my stuff. I replied, “Who knows? Where does yellow snow come from? It’s just a gift from God I guess.

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever...

A butler supplies food to nourish your body, but a writer nourishes your mind through writing.

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple...

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not....

My heart’s scripture tastes foreign in the mouths of cowards and on the tongues of those who have never breathed inthe moon and breathed out the world.

Its weird how i dream things that are worth writing.Its like God is writing them into my mind while i am sleeping and the moment i woke up i know i have to write what...

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and...

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can...

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish...

This is what I believe to be the progress of a writer. You write 10 things, of which one of them will be great. You then write 11 things, of which two of them will...

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

flat” characters, are all maps. It’ll be a story about boundaries.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day… You don’t go to a well once but daily. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the...

Bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean good writer. I think it takes 10,000 book sales to make the bestseller’s list, and at about 9 dollars a pop for my book, if I had an extra $90,000 dollars...

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of...

I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.

Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it....

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian...

A lot of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.the truth is we all are travellers in the...

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other...

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

When you’re writing what you love, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily...

There’s no other way but work, work and work. Read widely, live wildly, plumb the depths of your­self, turn your­self inside out until you find your voice

Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that...

In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and...

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is...

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have...

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.