All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only...

Write as though your life depended on it.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I...

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much...

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a...

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake,...

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope – to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that...

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves...

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It’s the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes...

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

All writing is rewriting.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow.

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a...

The only way to overcome fear and doubt is to go against them.

…there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

As I go off into the big black abyss of my future, I have to admit that I am terrified and also a bit insecure in my decisions. But, I also realize that anyone who...

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only...

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I...

My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his...

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness...

I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. […] She’s against it, it’s not...

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space...

A writer’s courage: to leave a blank page blank.

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above...

Writing is my passion. It’s in my blood like a talent is. Like dancing, or singing, or drawing, I write. I can never stop writing. It helps me to express everything I’m afraid to talk...

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life’s life-story.

Writing has the power of permanence.

I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I...

Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.

There’s a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don’t lead a story. You follow it.

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while.

It must take a lot of self-discipline,’ she said.’Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.’ He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that ‘Dumas, I think it was Dumas,...

Like the ‘good’ characters in literature, the sane don’t have any memorable lines.

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, ‘I feel as if I have looked down a corridor...

Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

How many pages will it take to tell your story?

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in...

My books are mine, and yet they are alien to me–as a child belongs to a parent and yet has a life of its own. I can guide and hope and nudge my characters this...

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing....

great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I...

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

I can’t believe I wrote that many words in a row.

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership...