And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a...

I had thrived in Miss Popham’s class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best...

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

You are a writer. You just need to write.

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our...

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do...

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has...

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

I’ve decided I don’t like books that end with ‘The End’. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I...

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and...

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.

The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.

I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of...

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors....

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going...

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in ‘Dracula’ is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done;...

He has caught me using the word “literally” where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot possibly reprobate more severely than I do myself.

I write because writing is power. Writing is creation. When you write, you are as a god, a deity wielding his pen like some Harry Potter staff, making whatever you want to happen, happen. By...

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns...

When people talk to themselves they should listen more. That’s how writers are born.

Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”Carrie Fisher: “I did masses of opiates religiously.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai

Hal lain yang menghalangi produktivitas ialah pujian kritisi. Pujian itu bagai menantang saya, agar saya menulis yang nilainya sama dengan apa yang terbaik telah saya tulis selama ini.

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

Once you’ve started writing, it’s like you’ve opened up Pandora’s box.

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It’s who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them,...

But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?” You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious...

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

It’s okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn’t give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse...

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at...

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty...

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and...

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the...

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on...

take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

Those who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

Margaret: Can I – can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President’s name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President’s name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a...