I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

It was only after two years’ work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a...

We do not like the truth because it is simple, we do not want the truth because it is hard, and we do not trust the truth because it is free. Perhaps because many are...

An idea is a gift, a finished project is turning that gift into a book by making yourself write even when you don’t want to. There is no such thing as a block of time...

I tell students, when in doubt, to title their story after the smallest concrete object in their story. I warn them off plays on words, (‘The Rent Also Rises’–no; ‘Life in My Cat House’–no) and...

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

But I don’t want to write my own fiction,’ Cath said, as emphatically as she could. ‘I don’t want to write my own characters or my own worlds — I don’t care about them. ....

Active critical reflection is necessary in every aspect of our teaching, not only in front of a class. We must try to reevaluate our own values and experiences as they relate to our teaching. Our...

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention…

The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

Don’t resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.

The sky never falls with the rain. It is never weighed down by all that it carries. It takes all of its anchorsand turns them into stars. Learn from this.

When you’re a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it’s the same game played over and over again. There’s nothing unique or marvelous. It’s not an...

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness….Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather...

The scene is a writer’s study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has...

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little,...

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?'(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

I type as fast as a ten-legged man who just had eight legs chopped off runs.

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song,...

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If...

I wouldn’t read Jarod’s writing—not even if he paid me to read it. And he does pay me to read his writing, but that doesn’t mean I do.” Of course the quote continued on, but...

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you...

bobbybaird i’m a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

Don’t tell me to write your story. Write your own story. If you won’t write it down, it probably isn’t worth writing down—or reading.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Sometimes writing is easy. Other times it’s as hard as trying to eat a whole whale, after the whale has just eaten you.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of...

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity,...

I’ve found newspapers only useful as kindling material for campfires. It’s been said that newspaper articles are written at a fifth grade reading level. If so, I can’t figure out why journalists would write something...

Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.

Real mystery – the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book – was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent...

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after...

Robert was the owner and the Executive Director for 99 Red Balloons Japan Inc and entertainment and event company that provided entertainers decorations for promotions, special events, advertising, and for English language instruction at primary...

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children...

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped...

Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical...

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

İnsanoğlu nedense anlayamadığı şeylere kötülemeye meyilli.

I’ve met talespinners before, Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re afraid of life.

It’s 4:00 in the afternoon and I’m just now putting on clothes. The life of a writer is as free as the pizza I just had delivered is not.

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what I’m feeling?

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.