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

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also...

There were many words piled up inside my chest, stories waiting to be told. I wanted to hand all this knowledge to one other person, neither a master nor a disciple. I sought an equal...

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on...

Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.

There’s an old rule of theater that goes, ‘If there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.’ The reverse is also true.

Chase your dreams until you catch them…and then dream, catch, and dream again!

The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and...

Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea ofwriting a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating,...

Spelling Bees are useless and unnecessary competitions. Before Microsoft Word and Google, Spelling Bees had value, but now they are all superflewus.

sometimes i am not sure.if i am writing the poemor the poemis writing me.

By all means, tell the cops about the crazy robot lady with the black leather body suit and the Kill Bill sword. Hope you like straitjackets.

I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.

If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.

I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety,...

Respect your dream.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Never interrupt an author when he or she is ‘in the zone’, else you’ll understand the real meaning of ‘writer’s nib’.

… All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that...

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that’s...

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the...

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that...

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you’ll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other’s work as...

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,...

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing...

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people...

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers’ low-definition (LD) vocabulary.

Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they...

It’s often about the simple things, isn’t it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

After his initial homecoming week, after he’d been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he’d gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters...

I write to taste life twice; to savour the flavour of sweet times gone by, or spit out the bitterness before it multiplies.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me… I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I...

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others’ minds.

(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. ‘When you’re writing lines…you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We...

Any amount of theology can be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without them knowing it.

Tell me something wonderful,” he said to Dane. “Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.””You’re always writing one of your plays on the phone,” said Dane.”I said, something...

(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author’s story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from...

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.”[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less,...

I do not write poetry; I take words and dip them in feelings.