A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you...

I’ve always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped...

Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says “i remember you. I am glad you are here again”.

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.

sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of...

A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important...

So you went from one reader to two readers?” you’d be absolutely correct. And after I had congratulated you on your keen guess, I’d thank you for being 50% of my reading base.

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are...

he said.

Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.

I have been writing for about eleven years now. I went from elfish to elephantish, and in another eleven years, I hope to be Elford.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because...

Writing all day every day is good, but it’s not good enough. You need to have your clone ghostwriting for you too.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?

Writing poetry is about learning to pare down the poem to the most essential words. Every word used has to be crucial to the poem.

Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us...

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Writing:It starts at the keyboard,and it ends at the far corners of the universe. –Paako

Yeah, episodic doesn’t work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it’s just narrative shit.

Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

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....

Writing is a mysterious activity.

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.

My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn’t like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel...

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.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible