Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then...

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial...

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes...

If all that one sees is a tiny speck of perspective in the larger scheme of things. And each perspective is made alive by the amalgamation of learning. And learning is a mere accumulation of...

The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Writing opens the door to imagination.

You’re a mess, I confess, I despise you in the best kind of way.

I’ll use the blood from my spilling heart to write the words that were never able to slip out of my mouth, so you can see how much you’ve broken me into a perpetual state...

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or...

You’re a loner in body, mind, and soul. A writer who spends a day of solitude in the office is plagued by a mind that travels with the body. The work never stops.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the...

Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure

Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

… And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive–to be multi-dimensional–you must barter away some control.

And so I just kept writing to myself.

I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.

Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing...

I cringe when critics say I’m a master of the popular novel. What’s an unpopular novel?

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance...

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid....

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read...

Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all...

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place...

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hencethe need for continual conflict and resolution. We can’t have any boring books.

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure...

For me, all writing — storytelling and style — gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just books about orcs and goblins and dragons and wizards and bullshit. And to be fair, a...

…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough...

I have a disease; I see language.

At the end of the day, I just want to sit with someone I love and chat about what matters and even what doesn’t.

Sometimes writers (poets) expect me to think far deeper than I’m willing to dig.

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in...

Somebody told me I’m a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though–and what an odd way to achieve success. I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers....

Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking…a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself...

It is, of course, not only impossible for readers to know the intention of most, if not all, writers, but an author himself may think he is writing one thing while he is in fact...

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could...

I’m very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you?...

Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences...