The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year’s fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color....

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research...

It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing....

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words. I’m afraid it’s too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my...

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of...

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody’s typewriter, even Tolstoy’s, even yours, even mine.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish…Do you think ‘Titanic’ would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it’s impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they’ll keep writing and you’ll have hanged yourself.

Write drunk. Edit Sober.

Don’t be jealous, be agressive. Make 2012 yours!

I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.

You can’t be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living...

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master–something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and...

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two...

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler’s precision.But it was not...

Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no...

First and foremost, I am me. I’m real. I don’t write to impress. I write to express.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...

Authors are sick people.

Father is a school manqué … He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.

Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.

The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor–a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he...

No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it.

The job of the writer isn’t to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.

Write the ending first and then you’ll know before the opening sentence that it’s going to be a good book.

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

I write because it’s the only thing I love that always loves me back.

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Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out...

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value...