…what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I’m struck by how much they see and how much they know–and how much I don’t.Good art writing should therefore do at least two things....

Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?

Iniisip ni Lucas kung gaano kalaki ang kapangyarihan ng isang writer. Sa pamamagitan ng mga salita ay kaya niyang patigilin ang dyip, ilabas ang lihim ng mga pasahero, pabuhusin ang ulan upang linisin ang mga...

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way....

How do you even know I’m someone you’ll want to remember? We’ve only seen each other once before.'(Amber)’Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you...

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you’re not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.

I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.

History makes my mouth water – and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes...

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Religion is your idea of leading life, the value you not only hold close to your heart but ones that you practice, the passions in your life, the faith in your ideals, the vision you...

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a...

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, “weaving fearful vision” … A frustrated poet...

God pity the poor novelist.

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and...

To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an...

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real...

A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college…Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection...

Her love of words is a private passion – one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they...

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Writing begins as a solitary obsession and ends up as communication.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. […] The truth is that when an author begins to write for...

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me...

I am grateful to all my readers; you inspired me to keep writing.

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Jack Kerouac died after throwing up blood. The malt liquor. Then that other guy who shot his wife in the head. Burroughs somebody. And I wonder about literary figures. They’re all drunk and staggering and...