Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell...

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn’t climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can’t describe how bad you feel,...

poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of...

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader...

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and...

Apollinaire said a poet should be ‘of his time.’ I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in...

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer —...

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers or...

Treat your relationship with your writing as an important one. Seperti hubungan kamu dengan pacar, teman-teman dan keluarga. Temukan komitmen untuk terus berjalan maju, dan tentukan target untuk tulisanmu (secara waktu, juga secara kualitas), lalu...

Never put off writing until you are better at it.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

There is nothing like the moment you connect with a reader! Nothing like the response that you get when what you have written touches someone in some way. It’s a moment in which your work...

I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

I live entire lifetimes in my head. Sometimes simultaneously.

Bisognerebbe saper attendere, raccogliere, per una vita intera e possibilmente lunga, senso e dolcezza, e poi, proprio alla fine, si potrebbero forse scrivere dieci righe valide. Perché i versi non sono, come crede la gente,...

Life is so beautiful and so short that anything that makes me feel less than too much is nothing at all.

Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek or to give explanations for what I was doing. This freedom lifted me to the heavens...

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and...

I’m not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper...

Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for...

Early on I set out to write the next Great American Novel, and then later on I set out the silverware and enjoyed my dinner in silence.

Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing...

I don’t like writers whose writing is so obvious that I can predict what he’ll write while I’m still taking in his current thoughts. Why, this means that I know what he knows, and the...

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

You can read until you’re blue in the face, but I’d recommend writing until you’re red in the face. And ass.

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

I hope you enjoy reading my book as much as I didn’t enjoy writing it. Just kidding! I hope you don’t enjoy it at all.

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because...

A book is a suicide postponed.

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn’t keep up with what’s out there ain’t gonna be out there.

The best thing about being a writer is that ‘work’ is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

First organizing it on paper isn’t just academic, it’s an applied prerequisite for manifestation.

And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and...

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Honestly…this is why I write.I write to get the happy ending I sometimes feel is eluding me.I write for my sanity.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.