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.

Archive material is a fabulous starting point – individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

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.

Do not put statements in the negative form.And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never...

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..

Writing Cave means it’s Coffee O’Clock…Who am I kidding? It’s always Coffee O’Clock!

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.

Writing is like running away. Running away to a place you made with your own hand.

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I’m getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before...

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river’s flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I...

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think...

Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise...

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don’t even think about being a writer.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.

In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature,...

It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to...

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, so what happens when the person’s eyes are unavailable to look into? You read their words.

In crime books it’s possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it’s new. Nowadays it’s part...

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

The first duty of an Author is — I conceive — a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively...

My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the...

Writing is an adventure. There is no way to know where it will take you, and what you will find. You could find success. You could find fans. Or, best of all, you could find...

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

Whenever I didn’t know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

They couldn’t talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one...

Les choses les plus belles sont celles que souffle la folie et qu’écrit la raison. Il faut demeurer entre les deux, tout près de la folie quand on rêve, tout prêt de la raison quand...

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand...

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into...

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you’ve already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

When I began writing stories in exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page – I thought it would be like...