Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners,...

the art of reading, it occupies your mind no matter at any situation or mood you’re in..bringing you to completely different world, the enchanting world of the characters..giving you the best feeling after reading it..the...

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word:Read.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer’s [review of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the...

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and...

The imagination needs moodling,–long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.

If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

I’ll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write...

It’s like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back...

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

I dream. I write.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to...

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of...

How do I know you’re not crazy?” she asks. “How do I know you’re not the craziest dude I’ve ever met?” “You’ll have to test me out.” “You have my info,” she says. “I’ll think...

If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History...

Stop talking about it and just WRITE!

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

I’m not talented or gifted. I’m a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn’t work without mystifying the process.The weather is unpredictable,...

The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your ideas?”And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one that bleeds.

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

I was writing, writing all the time, in my head, looking out at the world.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let...

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you’re completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there’s no point to continue.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which...

Hard core authors are determined about their craft, and they know that building a brand entails hard work. They eat, breathe and live their writing.:

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you’re not. That’d be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open...

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow...

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in...

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.

Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three….

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the...

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.