Since I am never alone with myself. Since I am always watching the character playing my part in the scene, there is no possibility of spontaneity.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over...

Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author...

I love my style of writing. Nope, it’s not the most poetic stuff you’ve ever read but you know, it can evoke emotions and images and smells and sensations, and that is what I set...

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I’m just delighted they’re reading them at all!

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set...

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer’s job.

I write for ghosts; the ghosts I can’t see but I know stick around. Some I know are good. Others I know are bad. The first bring me nostalgic comfort while the latter instill unease.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

Find the problem, find the story.

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with...

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

All great writers share one thing in common:They finished their books.

I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you’ll do...

It’s okay to be crazy as long as you keep writing and are happy.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the...

Once again discovered: Do what you do because you enjoy. If expect others to give credit or honor your work, you are due for disappointment

And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago...

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a...

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? “Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat…” That’s freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence....

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone...

I just need to sit, think, write and read.

A dream in the night is but an untold story begging to be written.

You can’t write a poem until you live.

I realize that a writer’s business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

I think I have grown wise enoughTo not to wish to climb up the stairs’M gonna sit, walk, crawl, swing by on the step I amAnd let the upper ones have their stare

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work...

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory...

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was...

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white...

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on...

In my world,” said Posy, “authors write stories, and the characters do whatever the author tells them. It’s not like this–the characters don’t have minds and lives of their own.””How do you know this?” was...

I write because, as wonderful as life is – and it is truly wonderful – it isn’t enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep...

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I...

We live and breathe words. …. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you...