I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Maybe the key to finding the perfect song is simply rewriting the lyrics.

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re...

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his...

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid...

Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul…you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn’t snap.

I wasn’t born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don’t like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of...

Good writing ain’t necessarily good reading.

If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

Failing to writer everyday doesn’t mean that you’ve given up, though a chapter a day – keeps writers block away!

But the truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do with it.”(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one–or both. Usually both.

… The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper,...

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it...

It’s not the destination (of seeking the truth) that creates our dignity or integrity, it’s the journey. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately

Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)

Writing is the voice of the heart’ Julia Suzuki

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able...

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us...

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.

The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories–mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium–are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a...

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and...

Certainly, I want to capture the reader’s attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in...

If you want to be a successful writer you have to put your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard and put words on the page. Even shitty words are better than...

Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.

Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to...

A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.If only I could remember …

If you live with dogs, you’ll never run out of things to write about.

Your audience is your adversary. If you don’t have one get one – imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination....

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.

A book, a true book, is the writer’s confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, ‘This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!

Someone once told me people write down stories because they would like to forget, and those who read are those who would like to remember. Maybe I’m not ready to forget, and maybe you’re not...

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another...

A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.

Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.

My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That’s why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and...

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter–it is the only filter. If...

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.