Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

… And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive–to be multi-dimensional–you must barter away some control.

And so I just kept writing to myself.

I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.

Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing...

I cringe when critics say I’m a master of the popular novel. What’s an unpopular novel?

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance...

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid....

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read...

Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all...

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place...

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hencethe need for continual conflict and resolution. We can’t have any boring books.

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure...

For me, all writing — storytelling and style — gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just books about orcs and goblins and dragons and wizards and bullshit. And to be fair, a...

…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough...

I have a disease; I see language.

At the end of the day, I just want to sit with someone I love and chat about what matters and even what doesn’t.

Sometimes writers (poets) expect me to think far deeper than I’m willing to dig.

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in...

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you...

To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.

I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.

No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief

to the depths, to the depths.

Don’t keep your Muse locked up in the closet. Set them free to dance across the page and what they create will be a masterpiece.

My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don’t. Some read; some don’t. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make...

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us...

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Memang sulit menulis puisi. Dan untuk apa mempersulit diri sendiri.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves — you can get a complete education for no money. At...

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer...

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early… Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!

It’s rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else’s work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you’re...

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the...

The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.

Let’s face it: suffering discredits goodness. I’m agnostic in practice though faith-based in theory. I used to pray but now know he’ll do what he darn well pleases when he darn well pleases. Will he...

Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Kalo nggak nulis, ya baca. Kalo nggak baca, ya nonton film saja lah.

My advice is to write in the nude. Unless you do your writing in a public restroom, and in that case, I’d recommend wearing flip flops.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.