Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that’s too much pressure and you’ll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

Eating was still a sore point with Smriti.She failed to understand,when interesting options like mango juice or chocolates were available,why was she forced by her stupid mother to eat boring regular meals?After much contemplation,Nikhil came...

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn’t mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers–a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of...

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.

But in the wake of ‘Bullet,’ all the guys wanted to know was, ‘How’s it doing? How’s it selling?’ How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the...

[Henry] James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a...

Reshuffllng of thoughts – facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!

If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

I love being an author – its the first job I’ve ever had where I’m paid to daydream. Greig Beck

…hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create – and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the...

You have to stop and freeze the moment,” he told me I had told her. “You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to...

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation...

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.

When sitting down to write a letter, it always pays to calm one’s mood, collect one’s thoughts, and have a plan.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading...

As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape...

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To...

A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January...

The best kind of happiness is a habit you’re passionate about.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled…in a unique and inimitable way.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the...

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with...

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The...

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making...

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words–and own passages...

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor...