I have a great many opinions about writing, but I’m afraid that all of them are unprintable

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn’t. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world.

The end is everything.

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then...

One should use common words to say uncommon things

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

In my opinion it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism....

It ain’t a crapshoot unless you write crap.

Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.

It’s easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow...

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning… No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire...

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of...

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, ‘God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.” God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from...

Wrote my way out of the hood…thought my way out of poverty! Don’t tell me that knowledge isn’t power. Education changes everything.

This story was a story of our time. And a writer’s attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

The fact of the matter is that you should really stop concerning yourself with writing a book because anyone can write a book that totally sucks. There is nothing special about that.

The price of freedom is high, Bodour, and there is no writing without freedom. Break your chains, Bodour, break free of your prison and reach out for the forbidden tree. If you eat from it,...

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

Am I still writing? Unthinkable not to. In the very darkest night the words were like shiny pebbles. They caught the light of the moon and stars and reflected it back. One word among them...

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she’d written about it, as if...

There’s nothing worse than being violently jerked away from creativity.

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the...

Writing Vampire Erotica is like writing sex scenes for porcupines.

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing...

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.

She reminded me that I could write stories,/could be struck by lightning & live.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

It’s basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn’t and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is...

My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I’ve already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it’s God will.

Characters are just extensions of my madness.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer’s imagination.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting...

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: ‘Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write....

If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review...

Sometimes the things in our heads are far worse than anything they could put in books or on film!!

What about his style?” asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.”Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am...

It’s the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this...

Everyone needs time to develop their dreams. An egg in the nest doesn’t become a bird overnight.

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

I have talents that I’m not supposed to have: I can tell who crushes on who by how they stand, I can read strides, I can hear the tonal differences between an alto and a...

I wasn’t writing home. I wasn’t writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.