He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler’s precision.But it was not...

Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no...

First and foremost, I am me. I’m real. I don’t write to impress. I write to express.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...

Authors are sick people.

Father is a school manqué … He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.

Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.

The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor–a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he...

No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it.

The job of the writer isn’t to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.

Write the ending first and then you’ll know before the opening sentence that it’s going to be a good book.

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

I write because it’s the only thing I love that always loves me back.

Rahasiaku produktif menulis? Hanya satu kata: NIAT.

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out...

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value...

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

But ‘why then publish?’ There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies...

I have been writing now for over a week. I find it cleansing, refreshing; it is good for me.” (p.531)

Dream big!

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for...

no one could ever push you to write or become a writer, except yourself.

Will you read this? I think maybe it sucks. Or maybe it’s awesome. It’s probably awesome. Tell me it’s awesome, okay? Unless it sucks.” — Nick

They were the kind of words you read back and every lettered limb surprises you because you never knew you really felt those things the whole time.

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford...

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is...

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich’s lack of control over emotions is a crucial...

I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his...

I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail’s pace. I’m Life shapeshifted...

…imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to...

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don’t want to be writers. They want to have been writers....

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

People keep asking me …How to instantly become a better writer? It’s simple: Use “power words” and see for yourself.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

If you have Microsoft Word, you can become a writer tonight. Just start typing!

Books are for nothing but to inspire

There are certain books in the history of the world that should never have been written. This book makes all those look like masterpieces.

Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn’t write down what he has...

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the...

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second...