Poetry is not for profit. Poetry is for Posterity.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled...

I don’t write to chase away my demons ~I wield my pen as a weapon…calling those bastards to war!

If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it...

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, ‘Your style just isn’t right because you don’t use the really flowery language that romances have.’ My...

Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. “I will not Reason and Compare,” said Blake; “my business is to Create.” Besides, since you are like no other...

There’s writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time–except maybe when I’m making love.

I hope I don’t write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself “When did they live?” I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live!...

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

People who understand everything get no stories.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no...

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.

Research material can turn up anywhere – in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

My best writing surfaces out of the need to rebel, the desire to end emotional chaos and the importance I place on embracing that independent streak inside us all that makes us want to break...

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Remember that wasted minute at the start of the day? Hard luck but you’ll never find it again.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way...

It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the...

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which...

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for...

Don’t be afraid to write. I think a lot of writers of all ages have a fear that they aren’t any good at writing. That fear is normal. I feel it. Most writers who care...

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language...

Lost in a book is a great place to be found.

Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need...

and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn’t anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Write like it matters, and it will.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise...

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read...

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of…

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

Life’s adventures make great reading!

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.

…no good writing flows from a polluted well – you can write about monsters, but you can’t be one…

The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and...

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.