If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain – and there is no reason to think that those alternatives...

The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to...

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate...

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone...

The best thing that can happen to me when I’m writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I’m writing at all. It’s as though I enter into a kind of trance. I...

The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself…all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough.

Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I...

Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and...

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: “What if?” and “What next?” (A third question, “What now?”, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more a cry than...

Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our first impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that’s the basis on which we are judged first. If our...

We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.

Ah, yes. The dreaded goopy mouth.

when i write of you, my deari am holding youin the most exquisiteways.

I disagree with the advice of ‘write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily–as we shall...

If writing didn’t require thinking then we’d all be doing it.

Don’t judge it. Just write it. Don’t judge it. It’s not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of...

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Writers shouldn’t fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence — it is...

If you’re “one in a million”, and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.

I don’t think there’s any deep psychological reason. It isn’t comparable, say, to America’s involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it...

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve...

When you fail, get hurt, feel bad, but act on it! Everybody fails, but the ones who act are the ones who change the world!

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I’d never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (“NEVER USE A...

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Contemplation + action = breakthrough

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I’ve received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, “You should lay off the f-bombs.” The other is, “You should add more f-bombs.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine...

Sevgilim! (…) Cıgara içmekten vazgeçilebilir mi? Hik ye yazmaktan da, körolası, vazgeçemiyoruz. İşte bir müddettir ben de, elimde cıgara, adam arıyor gibiyim. Ne kadar üstü başı düzgünler, suratı ciddiler, hali azametliler içinde kalmışım ki bir...

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in...

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.

so little of what anything means comes through words.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a...

…writing surrounds us: it’s not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to...

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.