A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.

I wrote you a love letter. I used invisible ink to show I was being transparent with my feelings. And also to hide my feelings.

All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you’re selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

The author relates that the word “OBSCENE” springs from the concept in Greek drama that certain actions would be performed outside the scene or off the stage. He clarifies that the Greeks did not shy...

Very well then! I’ll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his...

‎I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

As long as they talk about you, you’re not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn’t die, just because the man dies.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of...

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax...

Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it…

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you...

On some days, writing is wonderful. On the days when it is wonderful, it feels like you are the God of a universe that the rest of the world is not yet privy to. And...

When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.

And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I...

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.

It’s okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn’t last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much....

it’s been my experience that most writers don’t talk about their craft–they just do it

(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political–for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the...

Writing nonfiction means I tell people’s stories for them, not because they’re special but because we all are.

A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

When I’m writing I don’t want anyone else in the room – including myself.

We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your...

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

One’s writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it’s all up; you may as well throw it away and begin...

Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will...

When you’ve got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I’d write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the...

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories....

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. ‘Theme for a novel: The contrary pull … ” No. If this notion were real, he needn’t make...

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It’s like I’m writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the...

Writers haven’t got any rockets to blast off. We don’t even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven’t got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught...

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in...

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

What you should actually be trying to figure out is how to tell your story. The one that is every bit as unique to you as your fingerprints.This is the truly amazing feat because you...

Well, Betsy,” he said, “your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith’s trunk for a desk. That’s fine. You need a desk. I’ve often noticed how much you like to write....

Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me...

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw...

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

Ink, a Drug.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that...

But you can’t fault me on my footnotes. I’ve worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of...

Realism can break a writer’s heart.

Show me the contract.

There’s a darkness to everyone, you just have to let it out to see the world in new eyes.