Toby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.

The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, “Hi. Thanks for writing me!

I am an architect of words; there is no limit to the number of ‘stories’ I can create!

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of...

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a...

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.

Our job as writers is to be as curious as a child, to see things for the first time, and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story...

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages,...

You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it...

To talk of many things:Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—”I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.

I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Writers write because they’re writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little...

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly...

For me, creative energy is like an old-fashioned ground-water well. When the well is dry, it’s dry. I can dig all I like, and all I’ll get for my pains is sore hands, some very...

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it’s also a cure for melancholy.

Finishing a book has massive implications for the writer, an empty head and an empty bank account springs to mind.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way,...

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

…there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and...

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer – not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi – though it is true that what...

I will be caught finally, I will be broken. Not broken, incarcerated. Her will be incarcerated in Her.

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your...

Don’t be afraid of what you’re creating.

Sorry, kid. You don’t get to exist in story; you’re too different.” You don’t want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they...

When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito’s birth changed all that.

Readers don’t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face...

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual...

A sense of mission lostin ink’sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn’t recognize at first.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare...

Every book I’ve read appears in my writing.

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It’s like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith – where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO’s...

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care....

No, she laughed.” How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels....

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest...