There’s no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We’re all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy —...

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story…or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words....

Moreover, in order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards.

Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message...

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot...

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, “if he could plot, we’d all have to get together and kill him.” Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan’s writing, the way he develops and...

There’s a kid or some kids somewhere. I’ll never know them. They’re particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The...

…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is...

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold....

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much...

I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen.

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

Hello, I’m Shellie’s new boyfriend and I’m out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I’ll cut you in ways that’ll make you useless to a...

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

There is beauty in the art, and a story in the words! spk

Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it’s no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of...

I write description in longhand because that’s hardest for me and you’re closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile

If you were waiting for a sign that you’re meant to be a writer…THIS IS IT.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Industry in art is a necessity—not a virtue—and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone...

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use...

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream...

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

I wanted not the momentary suspense but the whole world to which it belonged.

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don’t simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and...

murder your darlings

Great writers wield their words like a weapon; a double-edged sword to strike their readers with truth where they least expect it. -Matthew D. Forgenti

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil,...

A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.