It’s easy to say I love you, but much harder to show it. Be bold. Be in love—and show it. Love is like writing—show, don’t tell.

Writing unlocks the heart and soul that we might be receptive to God’s blessings.

Early on I decided that if I had to work I was going to work at something that I loved.”I’m glad she did. As difficult, chaotic, dysfunctional and crazy as the world in music and...

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in … but before he ever begins...

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the...

A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever...

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you’re not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you’re not interested or even involved.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself,...

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever...

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

The rest of it – and perhaps the best of it – is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

Me and my readers, we’re on the same page. That page is one.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Fantasy is an excellent platform to shine new lights on old truths.

Discovering Distilled Creativity”Amazing how sitting down to listen with no distractions – no tv, no devices, no radio – can enhance your life; the sigh of the wind the only ambient noise. Then, in that...

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’ Notice the ‘glimpse’ part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something...

Behind every drama is a good story…behind every tear is the person who wrote it.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin’s speech at National Book AwardsHard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our...

My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it....

This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

all the wordsall the poems know my warm, soft spots.

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every...

If you have a story inside you but don’t know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

Some of the stuff that I write really concerns me. If I’m not institutionalised by 30 I’ll seriously question the judgement of my friends and family.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one’s orbit.

I won’t stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

It’s too short,’ she said, ‘ever so much too short.’ Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths,...

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

You’ve got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it’s a novel, they know someone’s made it up and they know it’s not real,...

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country – a very different world – and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it...

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get...

Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It’s just literally never an option!

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.

Being an artist doesn’t take much. Just everything you got. Which means of course that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal....

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in...

Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing…. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the...

Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly...

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.