I just need to sit, think, write and read.

A dream in the night is but an untold story begging to be written.

I realize that a writer’s business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

I think I have grown wise enoughTo not to wish to climb up the stairs’M gonna sit, walk, crawl, swing by on the step I amAnd let the upper ones have their stare

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work...

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was...

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white...

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on...

In my world,” said Posy, “authors write stories, and the characters do whatever the author tells them. It’s not like this–the characters don’t have minds and lives of their own.””How do you know this?” was...

I write because, as wonderful as life is – and it is truly wonderful – it isn’t enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep...

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I...

We live and breathe words. …. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you...

I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why...

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is...

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all – the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all… You see it’s so immensely complicated. It...

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

You can critique her writing, but not her lifestyle.

Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which...

Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written–when only I can see them–from the moment when they will be read by other...

Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work – and realizing what opportunity is and what...

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard...

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world’s daytime dictionaries.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin – when we’re dancing with our own skeletons – our words might be all that’s left...

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have written even one poem if she’d had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a...

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

flavor of the wilds.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in...

I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a...

Don’t give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn’t what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what’s on the...

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters...

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it’s the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the...

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.