He has caught me using the word “literally” where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot possibly reprobate more severely than I do myself.

I write because writing is power. Writing is creation. When you write, you are as a god, a deity wielding his pen like some Harry Potter staff, making whatever you want to happen, happen. By...

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns...

When people talk to themselves they should listen more. That’s how writers are born.

Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”Carrie Fisher: “I did masses of opiates religiously.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai

Hal lain yang menghalangi produktivitas ialah pujian kritisi. Pujian itu bagai menantang saya, agar saya menulis yang nilainya sama dengan apa yang terbaik telah saya tulis selama ini.

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

Once you’ve started writing, it’s like you’ve opened up Pandora’s box.

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It’s who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them,...

But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?” You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious...

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

It’s okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn’t give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse...

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at...

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty...

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and...

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the...

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on...

take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

Those who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

Margaret: Can I – can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President’s name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President’s name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a...

I read your diary. I KNOW

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene....

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.

To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and...

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live...

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Yes, it’s hard to write, but it’s harder not to.

I would rather spend money on something, that fulfills me for eternity. Rather, than something that fulfills me for only an hour or two.

My characters don’t always know more than the reader does, because my readers get the best seat in Paper House.

I write because I’m free,because I can,because I will. I write because I must,because I’m breathing,because I’d go crazy otherwise,because it’s who I am.I write to make a statement,to share my thoughts,to discover myself,to express...

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or...

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would...

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy...

…each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)

…there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk...

In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that...

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t’ unloose; smooth every passionThat in the...

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third...