Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley...

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling...

Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It’s a way to find healing, and to healing others.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and...

Life is a book. There are many pages to be written.

A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think...

It’s wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you...

Writing is the great invention of the world.

(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there’s any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

It’s 1am, I have fiction to write!

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that...

I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Funny + sad is what I’m pitching for, every time.

Artists shouldn’t wait until they are told what their art should be, they shouldn’t follow trends or allow other people to influence their work, an artist should only create from the strongest emotions within their...

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

We are all pencils in the hand of God.

Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don’t describe it–make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make...

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet’s company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of....

Writing is my passion, not my job. I need to write as much as I need to breathe, if not more.

With writing, we have second chances.

It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find...

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen–and some of them feel about as planned.

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

If you don’t write when you don’t have time for it, you won’t write when you do have time for it.

writer’s block”. His name is Mr Johnnie Walker.

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.

You could write the best book in the world but if nobody knows about it, it is nothing

Writers are like tricksters. Their words lure us to embark on journeys and unlock our emotions.

Writing is something that you don’t know how to do. You sit down and it’s something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It’s beyond me,...

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.

I write because my imagination won’t let me quit. And because I want to read what I wrote and share what I’ve written.

I can’t write anymore. My words are paper airplanes tenuously gliding towards the dust. The wonder of the Phoenicians, which throughout the latter part of this entry I have not fully comprehended, is getting vaguer...

Books allow one to jump into another person’s imagination while also exploring their own!

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:”Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want...

The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and...

Not every owner of a qualified high-qualified for the position, and not every man did not have the opportunity to obtain higher qualification to the circumstances of what that he is ignorant or not fit...

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

Writing is a continuous discovery – a learning process.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to...

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

As long as music survives, poetry will never die.