If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.

Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s...

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself…It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the...

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write...

I think a great many people would enjoy doing what I did, and that is why they enjoy books and movies (and even TV shows these days) that feature Torture and Dismemberment, etc., etc., etc.

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.

I was going to write that all your clothes fall off, but figured you may have a problem with that. This was the second thing that came to mind.”(Karl and Elena)

I write with all my heart

The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind...

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity...

Border crossing’ is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work — editing, writing, and painting. I’m interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the...

She was a very funny writer but also a very thoughtful one. She made writers think and she made readers think. She was constantly playing on the difference between God and the writer.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough...

my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell.” There are certain things in life that are glorious, and they are glorious for everyone. There are more that are hard, and they...

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Be the CEO of your own career.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel...

To write a novel, you need an iron butt.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

The thing I write will be the thing I write.

Don’t get it right – get it WRITTEN!

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn’t work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.Sit down, and write.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets — dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

…there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you’re good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he’s not important anymore, and the Internet...

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your...

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.

I think that I had better go, Holmes.””Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

Writing well means never having to say, “I guess you had to be there.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason...

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...