Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I’m hoping...

Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like...

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person...

I’d never be where I am if more successful writers hadn’t taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles.

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

What doesn’t kill us gives us something new to write about.

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people’s lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history....

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Letter To Stalin”)

Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.

Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can’t always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new...

…if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman...

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.

why do I sleep? Because I dream, and that is where I hear the best stories and find the hidden destinations of life.

Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These...

She met a boyand called him Stargazerbecause instead of poemshe recited the names of constellations.He said the freckles on his armswere roadmaps to the sky,and the bruises that he carriedwere supernovas in disguise.”Stargazer

Writer’s block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is...

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that’s what writers do, they make contexts.

The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don’t know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who’ll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a...

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him...

I walked to Mairangi Bay beach, day after day, seeking companionship in the roar of the ocean, and contemplating the shipwreck of my life. There, in that isolated wilderness, amidst the screaming gulls, and consistent...

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were...

object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on...

{When Abraham Lincoln was 26 years old in 1835, he wrote a defense of Thomas Paine’s deism; a political associate, Samuel Hill, burned it to save Lincoln’s political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of...

We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we’re dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer:...

Let your passion bleed through your work. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Every writer knows that words are the enemy.

A story isn’t a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It’s an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist.

Crazy by definition isKnowing that true sanity isA figment of the educated mind

I write to make sense of my life.”-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever – A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So...

If you’d blush saying something in person, don’t write it.

A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run

The average novel invariably reads like a detective’s report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.

E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You...

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.