A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

What you think and how you think, influences what you ink and how you ink.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with...

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

It is the writer’s job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to...

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They’re just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

I wear a helmet when I write, because if you’re doing it right, writing is dangerous.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of...

The code of the coward is to run away. I know, because I wrote the manual.

They say that I am a poetI wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottleemotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle ondistant shores I am...

When you use your pen to think, you’re never wasting ink.

If we are exhorted to play simple melodies with beauty rather than difficult ones with error, the same should be applied to writing; simple words greater effect.

If you can listen to or read anything, but misspelled words offend you, raise your hadn.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He...

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is...

I’m the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of ‘somedays’. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it...

Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of...

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be...

All Poets are mad.

Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You’re giving a gift. You’re helping them grow and develop....

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however,...

Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with.

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there’s a good chance you were not called.

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

I don’t write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.

Sure, it’s simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

Her descriptions will be incandescent, perfect little nuggets of phraseology, and there will probably be lots of sex in her writing – the clinical type of sex with labias and clitorises and tongues going everywhere.

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent...

That’s how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

Don’t judge it. Just write it. Don’t judge it. It’s not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of...

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Writers shouldn’t fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence — it is...

If you’re “one in a million”, and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.

I don’t think there’s any deep psychological reason. It isn’t comparable, say, to America’s involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it...

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve...

When you fail, get hurt, feel bad, but act on it! Everybody fails, but the ones who act are the ones who change the world!