Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

It is not the task of a writer to ‘tell all,’ or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division,...

That tingle in the brain is called a word.It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.

Something good happened to my writing when stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn’t do something more complex. Don’t be confused by the word simple. Simple...

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its...

Once you familiarize yourself with your tools, you should forget about them. It will only throw you off-balance. In all these ‘rolling shit into little balls’ types who spend hours of time and reams of...

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

I don’t write for a living. I live to write.

I am here to listen to the knowledge of my soul and to communicate it through the written word.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and...

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a...

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

The surest path to success is to learn to have a healthy relationship with failure. If we aren’t failing, then we aren’t doing anything interesting.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then...

Really good writing has purpose and that purpose should be to shape other minds to desire truth and a more noble purpose in life and to become more thoughtful and knowledgable about important things like...

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof Ihope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am notunderstood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profoundis...

In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real theobservation has been noted and that is enough...

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a...

Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don’t keep space in your head for writing, you won’t write even if you have the time.

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act...

I tried to think outside the box but couldn’t open the lid.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the...

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of...

the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I’ll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name,...

You can never know enough about your characters

She said that in writing anything, you must be perfectly honest.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said “It is the trade entering his body.

Of course I do. But I always feel guilty when that happens. After all, my journal is the oldest and most loyal friend I have. And it never interrupts me when I’m speaking,” he added,...

If you end your story, it’s a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don’t, it belongs to anyone’s imagination. It stays alive forever.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

I write to create a sky where the moon can touch the sun and not get burned.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

Write what you know.

Today is your wright-time. Anything worth writing will be, or has been written already. A great story chooses its writer lest no wright should boast. Just write! If you don’t, you will come right in...

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been...

I am the perfect version of me.

Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a...

The audience– the book’s actual cast– quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would...

But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what...

Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.