Once you’ve started writing, it’s like you’ve opened up Pandora’s box.

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It’s who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them,...

But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?” You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious...

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

It’s okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn’t give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse...

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at...

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty...

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and...

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the...

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on...

take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

Those who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

Margaret: Can I – can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President’s name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President’s name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a...

I read your diary. I KNOW

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene....

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.

To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and...

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live...

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Yes, it’s hard to write, but it’s harder not to.

I would rather spend money on something, that fulfills me for eternity. Rather, than something that fulfills me for only an hour or two.

My characters don’t always know more than the reader does, because my readers get the best seat in Paper House.

I write because I’m free,because I can,because I will. I write because I must,because I’m breathing,because I’d go crazy otherwise,because it’s who I am.I write to make a statement,to share my thoughts,to discover myself,to express...

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or...

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy...

…there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk...

In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that...

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why...

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises…

I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing.A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but...

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Most of us have small, sad places somewhere in our hearts and my father was no exception. Sometimes we let our feelings escape in bursts of anger. Sometimes we make long, dismal faces. My father...

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words...

Genuineness is often sacrificed in order to showcase the author’s control over the form and subject matter, the end result technically sound but emotionally cold.

If I went back to college again, I’d concentrate on two areas learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they’re lost again.

Writers don’t get time off. Every moment – waking or sleeping – a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present...

Originality has nothing to do with producing something ’ new’ – it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one...

The best way in the world for breaking up a writer’s block is to write a lot.

Gemeinsam aber ist allen Menschen, die des guten Willens sind, dieses: daß unsere Werke uns am Ende beschämen, daß wir immer wieder von vorn beginnen müssen, daß das Opfer immer neu gebracht werden muß.

Writers will happen in the best of families.