I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that...

In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and...

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is...

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have...

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

I’m also old… and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I’m not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say...

I love writing, and the feeling it brings me can’t be described by words. So here are a few grunting noises that capture my mood when I write: ugh, eek, umph, and ahh!

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the...

Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a...

It’s a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you’ve mapped out for them is...

Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living breathing novel. A story is...

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn’t you are glad that someone...

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together”Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her...

Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel’s publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw–that she fell in love with her own creation...

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before...

Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from...

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.

As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and...

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.

A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.

…there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, “I don’t want to face this world, let’s get back to the hellish one I’m imagining.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would...

Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don’t have the fucking part in writing a book.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

…each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)

It takes a week to write a book, but it takes years to write a good one.

I don’t write stories, I write characters.

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t’ unloose; smooth every passionThat in the...

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make...

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

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third...

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.

You say you’re a writer but you’re depressed. Not an excuse; write from there. Write some depressing sh*t. Believe me. You will have plenty of readers who can relate. Remember writers write.

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.

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to...

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