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!

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,...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It’s a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to...

If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read;...

No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have...

Poetry keeps mein a highly drunken stateof divinity.

Art does what reality cannot.

i am infinitely yearningbrimmingand overflowingin wordsi discoverit’s another wayfor meto be in tears.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

…ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That’s finesse.

We have put our words on steroids and amped the language up so high that unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe–perhaps correctly–that nobody will hear us. In the process, we’ve sacrificed nuance...

As a travel writer I’ve specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader’s hair stick on end.

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar’s fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: “Fool!” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.

Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.