The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

…Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn’t the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn’t there more danger in ignorance than...

Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.

History tends to play games with the truth, but at least it does so with a flourish.

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.

Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living...

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

Write every day. Even if it’s only a letter.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today’s literary world; there’s precious little economic incentive to write one…

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But...

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind.

When you’re missing a peice of yourself, aching, gut wrenching emptiness begins to take over. Until you find the link that completes your very soul, the feeling will never go away. Most people find a...

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

It gives the reader a general idea of where you’re taking him, but doesn’t tell him exactly how you intend to get there, which is all he needs to know.

You are your greatest product and behind every book lies an author who wrote it.

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It...

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);obstinacy...

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.

I’ve never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don’t ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it’s free.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

History is gossip that’s been legitimized, and that’s really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They’d be right at home on reality tv.

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb “snuffle.

On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing ‘his new novel’. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being...

When I reach for my pen, nothing is out of reach.

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

When your words enter the material world in the form of ink or on screen, you are immediately afforded the opportunity to judge their worth.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget...

If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.

Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily...

Start the next one today.

Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the...

Why certainly, words possess power. They do! But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.

The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

Does it matter that people and thingsHave words,Have names?If not,Why read any book?A litany of useless lettersDetached from bone, muscle.Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,PersonReal?

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can’t be helped. The betrayal of one’s friends is a bagatelle in the stakes...

He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.

A Gift for YouI send you…A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is...

For me, art that’s alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

You say great artists sell their souls for their art?””Maybe,” she ventured.”That’s true, I suppose. If you’re doing it right, anyway. I’ve probably sold mine. Jack’s certainly sold his. And you, I imagine.””I have not!”...

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to...

The perfect song neither ends nor begins. It is always playing. Remember to stop and listen.