It’s 3:33 am as I’m writing this down on loose sheets of printer paper. I’m in the back office sitting behind the manager’s desk, just enjoying the good life. In essence, this job enables me...

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is...

I wrote half this book (the left half) while I was asleep, and I wrote the other half (the top half) while daydreaming. So here we have a case where two halves equal one quarter,...

You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own — never deny that for an instant — it has...

It has often been saidthere’s so much to be read,you never can cramall those words in your head.So the writer who breedsmore words than he needsis making a chorefor the reader who reads.That’s why my...

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a...

…’being published’ is not the same as being a real writer.

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only...

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

For those who can do it and who keep their nerve, writing for a living still beats most real, grown-up jobs hands down.

Nothing’s a better cure for writer’s block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and...

You must feel it from within. You must want to write the book. You must desire to write the book

Writing is a form of running away. Running away to a place you made by your own hand.

Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a...

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the...

Sometimes you can write about a character’s day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the...

Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:

When you left you left behind a fieldof silent flowers under a sky full of unstirred clouds…you left a million butterfliesmid-silky flutters You left like midnight rain against my dreaming ears Oh and how you...

Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal....

He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an intense, statesmanlike...

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing...

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only...

Write as though your life depended on it.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I...

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much...

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a...

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake,...

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope – to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that...

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves...

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It’s the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes...

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

All writing is rewriting.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow.

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a...

The only way to overcome fear and doubt is to go against them.

…there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

As I go off into the big black abyss of my future, I have to admit that I am terrified and also a bit insecure in my decisions. But, I also realize that anyone who...

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only...