A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court?...

When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I sleep. And when I can’t sleep I write.

Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require...

My writing, it’s all I have. Well, aside from my health. And shelter, food, and clothing. Oh, and my cat.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep...

My advice is to write during commercial breaks, and read while your favorite TV show is on mute.

If it’s fiction, then it better be true.

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she’s one of America’s great unpublished novelists. Over the years she’s written forty-two romantic novels, none of...

Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, ‘is a very bad novel’, it has to be reworked through the writers’ suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting...

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in...

Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose...

Words have weight.

Haven’t I told you scores of times, that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the...

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane...

Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean...

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be...

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all...

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in...

I won’t sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That’s that.

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure.

Writing is like baking cupcakes, you’re trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes it’s flour and eggs and stuff, and with books it’s ideas and words. The end result is the same...

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she...

Speak up and speak clearly. I want to hear what you have to say because it matters. Let’s listen to each other and respect one another’s opinions. Although, they may be different, wisdom allows us...

I’m a struggling writer, I’m struggling to convince people I’m a writer.

The finest SF comes to grips with life’s mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique...

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.

So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a...

A writer’s mind is a place where demons fight angels in disguise.

What I am interested in, what I write and care about, exists in the slow lane, somewhere between hand-ploughed fields and a pint of real ale.

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...