So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider...

You can be a writer who doesn’t read everyday. But you’re not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is...

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture,...

[Henry] James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a...

Reshuffllng of thoughts – facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!

If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

I love being an author – its the first job I’ve ever had where I’m paid to daydream. Greig Beck

…hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create – and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the...

You have to stop and freeze the moment,” he told me I had told her. “You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to...

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation...

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.

When sitting down to write a letter, it always pays to calm one’s mood, collect one’s thoughts, and have a plan.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading...

As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape...

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January...

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the...

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with...

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making...

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor...

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know...

Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn’t write!

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the ‘poetess’.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty,...

Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way...

I am a writer, I’m supposed to be intense and emotional,

It’s the witching hour once more-When the Muse comes out to play.He calls me through that magic door-Where galaxies of worlds await!

It’s not given even to the greatest writers to tell someone else’s story.

A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering...

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress…Actually,...

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a ‘writer’, and a talentless mediocrity!People...