I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Write like it matters, and it will.

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read...

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of…

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

Life’s adventures make great reading!

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.

…no good writing flows from a polluted well – you can write about monsters, but you can’t be one…

The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and...

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor –thank Heaven!–always Storm.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don’t usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and...

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.

No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.

Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do...

I’d realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.

It is said that you can’t write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can’t read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same,...

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted...

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down...

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

I’ll only tell you what matters. And, the truth is, everything matters.

The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we’re plunging in for the best treats

A lofty breeze rushed by, threatening to brush him over the ridge. He looked with hardened eyes off into the East as the first sign of the sun broke the horizon with a distinct flash....

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how...

Fiction—good fiction, anyway—is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality’s...

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Menulis itu peduli. Menulis itu mencinta.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell – that’s the hard part.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say.

I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on...

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

I became a writer when I learnt how to read — how to listen; how to see, smell, touch, and feel. But not everyone who knows these things, not everyone who writes, or publishes, is...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.