[I]t’s the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a...

I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it....

I don’t think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path...

Characters who simply have goals opposed by others do not create the effects of a story.

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering...

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and...

It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

It is easier to debunk a thousand myths than to write one true sentence.

This is the story I am working on. But it isn’t complete as I don’t have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different...

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

I don’t see how you can write anything of value if you don’t offend someone.

This is what works for me: I practise crop rotation with my creative endeavours. I’ve found that when the nitrogen runs out in the soil in one field, it’s best to leave it fallow for...

Remember yourself. Deep inside, you have an observer, a constant neutral witness to your posture, gesture, facial expression, breathing, taste, impressions of light and sound. Don’t leap to interpret. Just be there and observe.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate...

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could’ve been good. There’s an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you...

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft....

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

I’m a writer by profession and it’s totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so...

Destroy your life; then put it back together.You’ll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people...

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in...

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits...

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may...

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Słowo jest moją używką, moim narkotykiem, rozsmakowałem się w przedawkowywaniu

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it

Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.

Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about...

I don’t think all writers are sad, she said.I think it’s the other way around—all sad people write.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it...

Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious

In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never...

I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.

Restrictions and writing shouldn’t mix. Let your mind be open. Let it be a creative canvas.

Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my...

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write...

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future...

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature....

People ask me all the time, “Where do your ideas come from?” So, to clear up this question…I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.