You can cover a great deal of country in books.

It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn’t even know it.

Take life one chapter at a time.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching...

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you’ll get a hundred different stories.

I write to be a part of something – a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.

If I’m writing, at least I don’t feel as paralyzed.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that’s a good thing.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

My words shouldn’t be trophies to look at, but seeds to continue the cycle of Life.

How does one become a writer, Harry?By never giving up. You know, Marcus, that freedom-the desire for freedom-is a war in itself. We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves...

There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.

Inspiration is all around us. Don’t let the brain limit the mind .

Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life; the one thing I could do until the day I die and still feel like I haven’t done enough.

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people,...

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they...

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

Henry’s recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while...

When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around...

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

…we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It’s the opposite to living our lives episodically,...

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Most of the people I worked with in my old job were pretty cool. We used to go out drinking after lights out and the less pleasant members of staff would be the topic of...

You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn’t read your...

Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn’t always know what it is.

I’m merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories

If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether...

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all...

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. “This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends.” He stared at the paintings for...

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing...

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don’t make for good biographies.

Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

How often have the greatest thoughts and ideas come to light during conversations with the family over the evening dinner?

Y algo golpeaba en mi alma, fiebre o alas perdidas, y me fui haciendo solo, descifrando aquella quemadura y escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga, sin cuerpo, pura, tontería pura sabiduría del que no sabe...

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s...

If you’re a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation,...

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: “Do not...

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise...

this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity…You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

Writing poetry is a state of free float