Bad books on writing tell you to “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW”, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should...

. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.Another way...

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

On my website there’s a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: “The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world...

Love and ruin are explained with letters of the alphabet.The power of the word can describe the glory of the universe. It only requires an open mind and heart.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to...

The Book of Life, I’m still writing it—both literally and literarily. So far I’ve written the Table of Contents. Right now it’s more of a coffee table.

When you do your research write down whatever interests you. Whatever stimulates your imagination. Whatever seems important. A story is built like a stone wall. Not all the stones will fit. Some will have to...

The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become–and such lucidity is a form of joy.

The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we’re plunging in for the best treats

A lofty breeze rushed by, threatening to brush him over the ridge. He looked with hardened eyes off into the East as the first sign of the sun broke the horizon with a distinct flash....

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how...

Fiction—good fiction, anyway—is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality’s...

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Menulis itu peduli. Menulis itu mencinta.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell – that’s the hard part.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say.

I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on...

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

I became a writer when I learnt how to read — how to listen; how to see, smell, touch, and feel. But not everyone who knows these things, not everyone who writes, or publishes, is...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought...

The main question to a novel is — did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit...

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

Twofold misjudgement. – The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the...

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

I may have written this before, but I may not have written it as well, so I’ll write it again.

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

I could write from anywhere, including the moon, provided I had a pencil and not a pen.

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer’s block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I...

shit!

I cannot bear natural light when I’m writing.

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an ‘idealistic’...

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow ‘resembles’ the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the...

I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the...

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is...

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of...

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.