At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep...

A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write …

Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase ‘Timey-wimey...

Fear will do one thing and one thing only: hold you back

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible…Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced...

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and withoutcharacter and plot, no book can survive.

Write what you know. Write what you can’t forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope.

…The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn’t seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that...

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.