From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. … A tale may not display a great deal of...

There’s no equivalent to Mozart in writing.

Every exceptional writer holds a Master of Arts in Daydreaming.

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not...

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind...

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Initially, I feel expansive when I try something new, and then contract as soon as I encounter difficulty or the unknown. I am learning to experiment with my tolerance of difficulty and the not knowing,...

If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, “Wake up and write the book!

Love takes courage, if you’re doing it right. Not the kind of courage a soldier has, but the kind of courage a writer has. Say, I’m a writer, and I’m a lover—therefore I must be...

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all...

I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku.

He reflected. ‘I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Todentuntuisen kuvailun vaikeus johtuu siitä, ettei kieli voi ikinä tavoittaa olemassaolon perimmäistä ankeutta. Luulen monen kirjoittavan tarinoita elämästään juuri tästä syystä. Muistiin merkittynä tyhjänpäiväisinkin havainto tai ajatus muuttuu arvokkaaksi. Kirjoittamalla jostakin maailman ilmiöstä kirjoittaja poimii...

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the...

Your current circumstances are part of your redemption story He is writing.

Murphy is a writer’s best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he’ll steal the silver.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Tell him I said that he will know when he’s my age that books aren’t written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go...

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves – that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives – experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time...

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village...

I am often asked by editors, fans, friends about what I read or which authors influence my writing. My answer seems surprising to them, for people expect names and quotes from me, while I give...

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I...

Writer’s block, I just drove around it four times. All my favorite writers live there.

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

My name is Yogurt Vonnegut, and I write with a spoon.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

You can’t write with dry ink. Likewise, using another author’s dried words to make your writing more fluid is not only dishonest, but it’s against everything I stand for as a former lifeguard.

Being a writer means expressing with passion your imagination, nightmares, dreams, experiences and reality through words on paper. You are a successful writer when readers criticize, get emotionally affected by, and praise your written work....

Love allows us to remember the joy, and forget the pain. That’s why I write things down, to help me remember.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in...

I am writing history, and I can’t be there.

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully...

I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I...

Fear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.