The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off...

Times change and discoveries are made that render earlier techniques and approaches less effective. Change is inevitable. To remain rigid when the whole world is changing and advancing is to invite misfortune. The AA program...

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we’ll never meet.It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children...

The story I’m writing finds its own voice while I’m writing it.

My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.

Write what you want to write; don’t fear about who will read it.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Setelah menjadi seorang penulis, saya lebih giat lagi belajar menulis.

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

Zo is het nu met mij, er was een helder landschap en opeens kwam er nevel, opstijgend uit ik weet niet welke sloten, en nu zit ik in een dichte mist. Als ik het zonnige...

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede...

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but...

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. … If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.

I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

Flowers don’t tell, they show. That’s the way good books should be too.”–Stephanie Skeem. Author of Flotsam

I wear the universe backwards. I imagine putting stars in my coffee, and sugar in the sky. I imagine going fishing in clouds, and watching the sun hide behind lakes. I’m too busy dancing with...

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from...

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today’s writing falls into the first category.

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro,...

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it’s...

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.

That’s why I’ve just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There’s not a book here, Lawford, that hasn’t at least a glimmer of the real thing...

I think that thinking of our material universe, the one we perceive with our sense, as the only thing is not only foolish, it is arrogant. As well as, if I may add, in contradiction...

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Stomach.” I wrote it with alphabet soup, and then edited it with a can of chicken noodle soup.

When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.

Instead of reciting her an original love poem using words, I think I’ll use my tongue to more creatively explore the deepest parts of her.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of...

Are you kidding? No one is going to want to read this drivel” and keep on going. You’re going to revise and revise and then revise again anyway.

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on...

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

When you imagine it, feel it, then write it – creation is inevitable.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back...

Never ever forget that you enlisted in the ranks – you weren’t press ganged or drafted. Nobody owes you anything – least of all respect for your work – until you’ve earned it with what...

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” [Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing,...

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: “There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection,...

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”3) Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4)...

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line ‘Don’t palm all your abuses [of language upon me]’ was possibly too rude. ‘It’s in the book,’ I said. He didn’t hit me.