It’s always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of...

When a writer is able to experience the whole range of human emotions, from deep depressions to glorious highs, it creates a whole inventory of feelings and musings from which they can choose and infuse...

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap – a mere mention that has been left behind.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned...

self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect...

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

I believe the greatest pleasure in writing is in the progressive artistry of it. Each project is an attempt to do better than before – to produce a worthy work of art – something having...

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I’d get it down on paper if I were you.

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand...

Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would...

When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

In the past few years I’ve assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people — people who supposedly want to write...

Every time you go in, it’s like starting over. You don’t know how you did the other records. You’re learning all over. It’s some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and...

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author’s thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which...

That’s the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

When you write a story, don’t just write it – live it;When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the...

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolutely. But finding the subject and...

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.’ And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. …...

Josh Funk and Hunter Fraser: we haven’t been in touch in years, but you made me feel like the funniest kid in the world. I would stay up late on school nights to write things...

Upon descending our threaded words on the web by a steep and hazardous precipice of readers requires constant review.

P.S. It’s not schizophrenia, it’s creativity, there is a difference. My voices go away after I let them tell their stories.

But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?

I don’t think I’ve ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author...

I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn’t sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn’t the point.

I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several...

My writing is how I maintain.

And I’ve learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

Hug your nightmares.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this...

Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.

…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

And on the days I couldn’t breathe, I learned to paint air.

raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II...

A writer is a messenger for the subconscious.

Sometimes we dream of things that we’ve always wanted–of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it…and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I...