I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story....

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment...

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which...

It just happens to be the way that I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

In older myths, the dark road leads downward into the Underworld, where Persephone is carried off by Hades, much against her will, while Ishtar descends of her own accord to beat at the gates of...

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about...

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

Authors – trust in your vision.

Everything has its poetry. 94

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought...

It’s always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand...

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able...

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers’ job specification.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I’ve discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of...

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see...

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply...

Remember…we don’t see objects, we see light. […] Light can do anything water can do–flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do–paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always...

It’s a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the...

If the boy who drawslets you look over his shoulder.If the poetsmilesand shows you her words.If the girl who sings for the shower only,hums a songin front of you.Know that you’re no longer a personbut...

For some, vampires are still firmly in the ‘evil, scary’ column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part...

Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but...

The Bible, most influential book, which have the ability to transform many lives.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, ‘How do I make a living from this?’ It’s a fair enough question and one I always try to...

I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. […] She’s against it, it’s not...

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space...

A writer’s courage: to leave a blank page blank.

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above...

Writing is my passion. It’s in my blood like a talent is. Like dancing, or singing, or drawing, I write. I can never stop writing. It helps me to express everything I’m afraid to talk...

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life’s life-story.

Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn’t even know it.

Take life one chapter at a time.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching...

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you’ll get a hundred different stories.

I write to be a part of something – a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.

If I’m writing, at least I don’t feel as paralyzed.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.