This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.

Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and...

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die.

There is beauty in the art, and a story in the words! spk

Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it’s no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of...

There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait.

I write description in longhand because that’s hardest for me and you’re closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment...

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile

If you were waiting for a sign that you’re meant to be a writer…THIS IS IT.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Industry in art is a necessity—not a virtue—and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone...

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use...

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream...

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

I wanted not the momentary suspense but the whole world to which it belonged.

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don’t simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and...

murder your darlings

Great writers wield their words like a weapon; a double-edged sword to strike their readers with truth where they least expect it. -Matthew D. Forgenti

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil,...

A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.

I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow...

A blank piece of paper and a pen or a pencil is always all ears.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I...

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and...

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.

Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to...

Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you...

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never...

Err on the side of awesome.

There’s more to the erotic life than explicitness.

Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.