When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then...

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is...

Environ une demi-seconde après avoir terminé votre livre, après en avoir lu le dernier mot, le lecteur doit se sentir envahi d’un sentiment puissant; pendant un instant, il ne doit plus penser qu’à tout ce...

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can’t manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

everything are in writing, except one true eyesight

Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

Remember William Blake who said: “Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told...

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were...

The other night we talked about literature’s elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated “dose” of life. I said, almost indignantly, “That’s the danger of it, it prepares you to live,...

Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy.

I think the reason why I don’t read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand...

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank...

In my poetry a rhymeWould seem to me almost insolent.Inside me contendDelight at the apple tree in blossomAnd horror at the house-painter’s speeches.But only the secondDrives me to my desk.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

I lose it when I can’t write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.”(Interview, The...

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I’ve seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.’If you don’t -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to...

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most...

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of...

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling...

I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. …If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it’s shit. Write some more. Repeat.

What is a writer?A writer is a magician who can create a masterpiece With a wave of a pencilA writer has the key to a new worldCapturing readers and taking them on a roller coaster...

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled...

Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a...

You’ll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That’s when you know you’re a writer – when you take the failures and appear at the...

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false...

Waandishi wanapaswa kuwa wadadisi, kama paka, ijapokuwa udadisi ni hatari.

How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.

I couldn’t admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck ’em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body.

Darling, in this family we don’t call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

You’ve got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it’s a novel, they know someone’s made it up and they know it’s not real,...

Lost in New York City. Not that I don’t know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

I write because I cannot NOT write.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.