True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart...

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique...

Once again discovered: Do what you do because you enjoy. If expect others to give credit or honor your work, you are due for disappointment

Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s...

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone...

I’m a disciplined author. My diligent daily writing technique is called sleeping.

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

You can’t write a poem until you live.

Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again.

A writer will always be a writer. It’s not a choice, it’s a destiny.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Write because you love to write.

I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to...

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

There’s no savior here. Especially not at 1:15 a.m.

With our writings, we can right the world.

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the...

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card – the kind that has a satin ribbon on...

For every laugh, there should be a tear.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Chapter 1.He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion…no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was...

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing...

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

You’ll drown in my love story, if I ever write it using a fountain pen.

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

You are either born a writer or you are not.

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I’ve suffered, how much I’ve been through, but most importantly how far I have come.

Sometimes I’ll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I’ll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels...

I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

My writing doesn’t improve if you think it’s great, and it doesn’t lessen if you think it sucks. Likewise, you not showing me love doesn’t mean mine for you has to be invisible. The two...

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as...

You know, it’s a funny thing about writers. Most people don’t stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago–they don’t expect to...

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It’s hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a...

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it’s built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer...

Too many irons, not enough fire.

Which story do you want to hear my child?”he picked him up and made him sit on his lap.”Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of...

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it’s robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It’s like a germ planted in the...

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What...

It’s as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when if feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his...