flat” characters, are all maps. It’ll be a story about boundaries.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day… You don’t go to a well once but daily. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the...

Bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean good writer. I think it takes 10,000 book sales to make the bestseller’s list, and at about 9 dollars a pop for my book, if I had an extra $90,000 dollars...

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of...

I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.

Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it....

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian...

A lot of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.the truth is we all are travellers in the...

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other...

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

When you’re writing what you love, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily...

There’s no other way but work, work and work. Read widely, live wildly, plumb the depths of your­self, turn your­self inside out until you find your voice

Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that...

In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and...

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is...

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have...

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

I’m also old… and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I’m not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say...

I love writing, and the feeling it brings me can’t be described by words. So here are a few grunting noises that capture my mood when I write: ugh, eek, umph, and ahh!

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the...

Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a...

It’s a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you’ve mapped out for them is...

Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living breathing novel. A story is...

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn’t you are glad that someone...

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together”Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her...

Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel’s publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw–that she fell in love with her own creation...

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before...

Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from...

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.

As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and...

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.

A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.

…there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, “I don’t want to face this world, let’s get back to the hellish one I’m imagining.

Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don’t have the fucking part in writing a book.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.