I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique; nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts. It’s a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the...

Read! Write! Imagine! Create! Love! Live!

I love writing poetry because it’s pretty. I love writing pretty.

I wisely started with a map.

When I finally find that one willing agent, I’ll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.

Good writing just isn’t that common.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

When you’re a writer, the question people always ask you is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Writers hate this question. It’s like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Where do you get your...

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall....

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens,...

Buku yang kau tulis adalah semacam jejak yang terus menyala di dunia, dan bisa menjadi cahaya akhiratmu.

What do you do when your head – your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?You focus on the really good ones!

Writing blooms flowers for mind, which last forever.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost,...

Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t...

Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.

What are you going to do? “Can’t say – run for president, write -” “Greenwich Village?” “Good heavens, no – I said write – not drink.

And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book...

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I...

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an...

Part of my soul goes into each quote I write. A book of my quotes can be yours for just $19.99.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Creative exhaustion is first cousin to writer’s block. First off, I try to accept that when it hits, I am not wasting time, but preparing myself to return to work. I blog more. I do...

People always see me writing and ask me if they can read my writing. The answer is yes, after I publish it and they pay for it.

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

I once wrote a book ten stories high. Each story was a story.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow...

Don’t lift my words without permission. It might lead to a hernia.

I write things that I would like to read myself.

I think the perfect pen name is Quill McSeagull. Especially for writing flights of fancy—and nothing has more feathers than a love poem.

If you can quit, then quit. If you can’t quit, you’re a writer.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness....

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless …...

Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time...

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Novels for me are how I find out what’s going on in my own head. And so that’s a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other...

History makes my mouth water – and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself...

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a...

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and...

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted…. To write a book set in...

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Membacalah empat jam sehari dan menulislah empat jam sehari. Kalau kau tidak bisa meluangkan waktu untuk itu, jangan harap kau bisa menjadi penulis yang baik.