Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the...

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with...

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making...

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor...

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know...

Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn’t write!

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the ‘poetess’.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty,...

Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way...

I am a writer, I’m supposed to be intense and emotional,

It’s the witching hour once more-When the Muse comes out to play.He calls me through that magic door-Where galaxies of worlds await!

Writers leave a trail of magic everywhere they go.

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.

Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn’t even know it.

Take life one chapter at a time.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching...

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you’ll get a hundred different stories.

I write to be a part of something – a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.

If I’m writing, at least I don’t feel as paralyzed.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that’s a good thing.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

My words shouldn’t be trophies to look at, but seeds to continue the cycle of Life.

How does one become a writer, Harry?By never giving up. You know, Marcus, that freedom-the desire for freedom-is a war in itself. We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves...

There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.

Inspiration is all around us. Don’t let the brain limit the mind .

Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life; the one thing I could do until the day I die and still feel like I haven’t done enough.

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people,...

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they...

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

Henry’s recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while...

When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around...

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

…we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It’s the opposite to living our lives episodically,...