If you can’t stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague...

You can’t eat [literature], that’s the problem,” he said. “I’ve tried, it’s very dry, and not at all nutritious.

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this–whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude...

There is always, always, always something to write about.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

If you love something, you find a way to have it in your life. Opposers may take away your means and tools, but you simply turn to crude replacements, fashioning them from scraps if necessary....

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors...

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so...

Don’t get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That’s a story. Handled properly, it’s more dramatic...

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but...

Love is meant to be taken seriously, like a joke.

…what makes a story unique is not necessarily the information in the story but what the writer chooses to put in or leave out.(pg. 146-147)

but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that...

BIG books are better. There, I said it and it’s true. 

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn’t mind.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn’t worth your time — life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, “when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair’s off to one side and I feel like I’ve...

Seperti apakah Anda? Menurut saya, paling tidak Anda adalah apa yang Anda tulis.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

A true writer cuts their heart open and lets it bleed all over the page… ~Cynthia Batten

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles’ and cousins’ books, tablets and capsules and powders…and then one day...

I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater,...

I really do literally put myself into a character’s shoes.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and...

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court?...

When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I sleep. And when I can’t sleep I write.

Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require...

My writing, it’s all I have. Well, aside from my health. And shelter, food, and clothing. Oh, and my cat.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep...

My advice is to write during commercial breaks, and read while your favorite TV show is on mute.

If it’s fiction, then it better be true.

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she’s one of America’s great unpublished novelists. Over the years she’s written forty-two romantic novels, none of...

Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, ‘is a very bad novel’, it has to be reworked through the writers’ suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting...