…you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you’ve sold your first book.

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

Perfect is a dream that you wake up from and spend forever trying to remember.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell...

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn’t climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can’t describe how bad you feel,...

poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of...

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader...

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

I write because I love it, not because I excel at it. But because I write, I shall slowly excel at it.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you...

Writing is hard work, not magic. It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for. What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it?...

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler’s L.A. to Dickens’s London.

The Writing never stops…

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Membaca dan menulis membuatmu menjadi.

At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries....

You’re writing every moment in your mind but not putting it down on paper. Write your thoughts; it will be beautiful.

A lot of (children’s literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can’t preach to kids, and...

There Are Two Typos Of People In This World: Those Who Can Edit And Those Who Can’t

One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, “Where do you get your ideas?” When people ask me this, my usual response is, “Ideas are the easy part. The hard part...

Write the words “The FIve Senses” on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place...

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness,” the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing...

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life – sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words...

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

I read not for entertainment but to feel what the writer has felt while writing even though if it was fiction.

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who...

Against the censurers of brevity. – Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not...

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must...

Write.” And do you know how long it takes to type with one hand while your other hand is shaking from holding a loaded Sig Sauer? Well, at least twice as long.

It perhaps might be said–if any one dared–that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

My writing looks like it’s ten steps behind my mind, and racing to always catch up.

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s...

A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included.

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes,...

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn’t keep up with what’s out there ain’t gonna be out there.

The best thing about being a writer is that ‘work’ is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

First organizing it on paper isn’t just academic, it’s an applied prerequisite for manifestation.

And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and...

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.