Sometimes writing is easy. Other times it’s as hard as trying to eat a whole whale, after the whale has just eaten you.

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity,...

I’ve found newspapers only useful as kindling material for campfires. It’s been said that newspaper articles are written at a fifth grade reading level. If so, I can’t figure out why journalists would write something...

Real mystery – the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book – was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent...

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after...

Robert was the owner and the Executive Director for 99 Red Balloons Japan Inc and entertainment and event company that provided entertainers decorations for promotions, special events, advertising, and for English language instruction at primary...

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped...

Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical...

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

İnsanoğlu nedense anlayamadığı şeylere kötülemeye meyilli.

I’ve met talespinners before, Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re afraid of life.

It’s 4:00 in the afternoon and I’m just now putting on clothes. The life of a writer is as free as the pizza I just had delivered is not.

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what I’m feeling?

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It’s a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to...

If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read;...

No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have...

Poetry keeps mein a highly drunken stateof divinity.

Art does what reality cannot.

i am infinitely yearningbrimmingand overflowingin wordsi discoverit’s another wayfor meto be in tears.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

…ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That’s finesse.

We have put our words on steroids and amped the language up so high that unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe–perhaps correctly–that nobody will hear us. In the process, we’ve sacrificed nuance...

As a travel writer I’ve specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader’s hair stick on end.

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar’s fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: “Fool!” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.

Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you’ll do...

Submit your story the same way you submit your heart. Let it break. Bruise it up. Let it get pummeled and sore and when you can’t take it anymore, throw it out there again.

You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can,...

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

When you don’t have the pressure of pleasing someone else and do something because you love doing it, that’s when the best works are born.

Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.

Once again discovered: Do what you do because you enjoy. If expect others to give credit or honor your work, you are due for disappointment

It’s part of a writer’s job to be nosy about everything.

Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial…a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as...

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone...

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley...

You can’t write a poem until you live.

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling...