Writing things was important, wasn’t it? Nakata asked.’Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only author who intends to take the longest possible route to a destination that will always be over the next hill.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to...

She doesn’t quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still...

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot – like an echo from history, still very alive.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

I could not think without writing.

How can you write if you can’t cry?

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian’s mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is...

…but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.

It’s entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

What do you think is my favourite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. “Wuthering Heights.” Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth...

A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do...

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it...

Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, “discourse communities” are often gated,so it’s the good writer’s job to offer readers...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

You were meant to write this book.

You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.

Well I want something to do, to create, to achieve, to whatever…. Something I can’t get enough of. You know something that I can’t wait to get up in the morning to do something I...

All a poet can do today is warn.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, ‘open your mind to me and I’ll take you to another world.

In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener....

Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. ‘Lost Illusion’ is the...

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

Frustration of mind can be revel through writing something even if it will be never read.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don’t...

When I began writing stories and exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page. I thought it wouldn’t be like a...

Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.

Authors are merely the medium between the words and the page.

It’s during a storm that the best songs get written.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it...

At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of...

Give a poet a pen

A book comes and says, ‘Write me.

There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it’s because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course....

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for...

Write as if no one is going to read it.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given-...

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.