Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer – doesn’t use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

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.

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis’s Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win...

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I’m using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have...

I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you...

a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

… and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself...

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk...

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they...

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them...

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth. But all of that is nothing if those words fail to...

Writer’s Block is just an excuse by people who don’t write for not writing.

It is strange to hear my wordsRead back to me.I don’t think I wrote themTo have them ever leave the page.I think I only writeWhat happens across my brainWhen my feet are too weary To...

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and...

Truthfully, there’re only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won’t care if you’re happy, only if you’re miserable like they are. They eat that shit...

Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between...

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Writers are archeologists of themselves.

Love isn’t in a hurry like a flurry of flowery words on paper. It’s lush and slow to grow its aroma in the garden of time.

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I...

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Of course, you cannot just blurt out a quote whenever you feel like it. For a quote to have the desired effect, it must be properly introduced.

The unconscious fabric of human destiny had done with her, unraveling all her grievances and reweaving them as joyous circumstance.

The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and...