When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. ‘Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?”You know what. You know I’m going to be a ball player.”Well, I’m going to...

Ideas are cheap — making something of them is difficult

Should you care to write (and only the saints know why you should) you must needs have knowledge and art and magic – the knowledge of the music of words, the art of being artless,...

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down–impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing...

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

… endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that...

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don’t read books.

As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie… I want it to be about the...

we as authors have been writing about people we aren’t for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are...

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and...

Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I’ll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips....

My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

The best restaurants are always down the side streets.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

I can be a woman on a mission. But I’ll choose what mission that is. And that my friend is where youll see the results.

you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

Write about the emotions you fear the most.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable...

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can....

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses...

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t...

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

I can’t imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.

To be a poet in today’s technological age means to be underrated and at times, ignored. In a world where the noise of industry reigns supreme, the poet’s voice is being drowned out, but it...

…it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

The first thing I ever learned in roller derby is to fall, and in the author world I believe that same rule applies.

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I’d started writing down, but I couldn’t. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that...

Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?””Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvelous. It...

She meant you have to live a story for a time.”And?”And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?”Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.”Kind of the perfect question to answer in...

The writing in itself is transformative for me.

I’ve always said “Writer’s Block” is a myth. There is no such thing as writer’s block, only writers trying to force something that isn’t ready yet. Sometimes I don’t write for weeks. And then all...

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days…it will demand absolutely everything of you.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.

To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential; productivity becomes obsolete.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today...

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the...

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel,...