Our willingness to write truthfully brings the story to life.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a...

Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.

You cannot write unless you write much.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Traveled so far, and not yet have they come across anything of interest, he mused, except, of course, for that nest of goblins I managed to stir up. Indeed, his brother had always been a...

While I was trying to write, I was trying to grow.

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman’s paper called Milady’s Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her “Husbands and Brothers” page on...

You can make anything by writing.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even....

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even,...

To write is to release the soul. So write. What right have we to leave a thing of such beauty bottled within ourselves?

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you...

Thought for the day: Twitter…140 character limit…must be a great tool for fortune cookie writers…

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.”(“The Castle”)

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like...

It’s impossible to be a good writer if you haven’t lived badly.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

As we write we summon little demons.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

There are… otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that...

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and...

You have the itch for writing born in you. It’s quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid...

…I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense – but even there I can’t even control what people do…

The night before a deadline, I usually am in desperate need of a back rub. And new wrists. And candy. And little mice to secretly finish the job while I am sleeping.

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing...

A watched pot never boils.” It’s the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is...

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

No price is too high to pay, to be the author of your fate.

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true;...

…you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you’ve sold your first book.

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

Perfect is a dream that you wake up from and spend forever trying to remember.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell...

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn’t climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can’t describe how bad you feel,...

poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of...

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader...

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.