If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m...

A book lives a new life every time it is read.

Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense,...

There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium...

Strength is taking charge of your own destiny and not waiting on others to do so. You don’t have to swear and drink and beat people up and slay monsters. You’re allowed to cry and...

When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather...

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That...

David had left her,taking his insane jealousy with him.

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

…escribir lo que no se había vivido, lo que sólo se había querido vivir, era también una manera —cobarde y tímida— de vivirlo…

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist’s task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal...

Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story—whether it’s happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is—depends entirely on where...

I choose to write because it’s perfect for me. It’s an escape, a place I can go to hide. It’s a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It’s a journal, when the...

Don’t be indifferent about any random idea that occurs to you, because each and every idea is for a particular purpose. it may not be beneficial to you, but can be what others are craving...

Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.

I don’t know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn’t get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she’d...

When people say, ‘you’re so young to be a writer,’ I always reply, ‘I started young because I’ve got a lot to write.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us...

I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a...

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so...

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’...

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don’t.

I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear...

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) … it’s that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader’s heart.

I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal...

Producing works of art doesn’t often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing...

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Professional writers don’t have muses; they have mortgages.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Do you write novels?” I said.”Novels, Lord no,” she said. “I can’t even stay married.

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge...

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Jane’s stories are too sensible. Then Diana puts too much murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get...

The p’int of good writing is to know when to stop.

When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.

Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

I’m not gonna lie…sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.

Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society...

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who...

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I’d probably miss if I stayed straight. But I’m neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill...

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers’ circles and at summer schools,...

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.