Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Writing is like cooking. You toss in a bunch of ingredients and hope the combination of flavors will appeal to someone’s taste.

They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have...

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto...

Saber fer les coses que no es volen fer ajuda a fer bé les coses que es volen fer

Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.

The Power of the Pen is not in the color of ink it spills; but the power of the word it spells

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

sometimes i wake upin the middleof the nightand findpoetry splatteredall over my bed.

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn’t have, and I could order this environment in the way that I...

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started.

I’ve learned to let my characters speak and act the way they want to! I’ve tried to interfere but they just get angry at me and throw big rocks.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional … My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their...

Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresistible necessity to enter upon your great labour.

Editing one’s writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.

A lot of people who read my novel ‘Smog City’ ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it’s because I’ve given them life. Not literally of...

After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes...

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device – a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle,...

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

I’m a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)

Disappearing Act”)

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

Good” now is better than “Best” never.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart”- Phyllis Theroux

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on...

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only...

I was asked once why I write poetry. I said, why do you breath?

To breathe is to live, but to write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find...

Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.

I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed.

To write a good book, you must read one book for each page of the book you are about to write.

The material’s out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a...

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway…Awakening does not feed ego’s needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn’t...

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?

Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you’re an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you’re an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a...

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

It is not the task of a writer to ‘tell all,’ or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division,...