I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes...

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king...

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Definition of rock journalism: People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read.

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest.

It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would...

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.

It’s hard to be a dreamer sometimes. I’m tired.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the...

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is...

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one’s arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until...

Why I write music? Because it hurts not to.

Here’s what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full...

Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.

… a good idea always attracts other good ideas.

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.

virtue.

public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can...

But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.

The best part of having your dreams come true is you get to make new ones!

Somebody is observing my writings, I know that.That’s one reason why I keep reading and writing.

If there’s something I’m not good at, it’s usually because I just organically despise it. I can’t help that. I’m fabulous at too many other things to waste my time faking it.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I’ve already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the...

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart...

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique...

Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s...

I’m a disciplined author. My diligent daily writing technique is called sleeping.

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again.

A writer will always be a writer. It’s not a choice, it’s a destiny.

Write because you love to write.

I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to...

I believe that we don’t choose our stories,” she began, leaning forward. “Our stories choose us.” She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. “And if we don’t tell...

Remember if you write, write, write, you can never be wrong.”—Stephanie Skeem Author of Flotsam

What is the finding of love, but a voice answering a voice?

I don’t teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the...

friend.” Teach me?