Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb “snuffle.

On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing ‘his new novel’. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being...

When I reach for my pen, nothing is out of reach.

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

When your words enter the material world in the form of ink or on screen, you are immediately afforded the opportunity to judge their worth.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget...

If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.

Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily...

Start the next one today.

Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the...

Why certainly, words possess power. They do! But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.

The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

Does it matter that people and thingsHave words,Have names?If not,Why read any book?A litany of useless lettersDetached from bone, muscle.Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,PersonReal?

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can’t be helped. The betrayal of one’s friends is a bagatelle in the stakes...

He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.

A Gift for YouI send you…A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is...

For me, art that’s alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

You say great artists sell their souls for their art?””Maybe,” she ventured.”That’s true, I suppose. If you’re doing it right, anyway. I’ve probably sold mine. Jack’s certainly sold his. And you, I imagine.””I have not!”...

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to...

I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought...

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it –...

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

Work. Don’t Think. Relax.

The desire to write grows with writing.

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Even your sweetest character has claws, no matter how well they may be retracted and hidden (hidden even from herself).

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James,...

Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.

If you want things to change, you must change. If you want things to get better, you must get better.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words...

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much...

Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that...

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Lost Mustache. Please do not feed. If found, contact Mouth,” and I left my phone number. Nobody’s called. Perhaps the neighborhood cat lady took it in and is petting it on her lap at this...

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of...

I decided to write this piece because my internal critic told me to write it. At least I think he told me to write it. You see, he only speaks French, and I don’t speak...

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.

I want to type one of my books into a free online translation website, and convert it from English to German and then publish the results as an exercise in the absurd.

If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.

A picture with one word on it is like a thousand-and-one-word piece of literature. At this rate, I should be done with my million-word novel in about 999 minutes.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.