I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the...

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is...

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of...

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting...

Music is a language – and language, at its finest, should be music.

J’ai un but, une t che, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d’écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible.”(“I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession...

By remaining constrained in one’s environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which...

Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,...

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

how these words, wait to diein the arms of all the poetry..yet to be written.

I guess you can call me “old fashioned”. I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages...

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

I before E except after C. Weird?By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.I think all writers are weird.

Basically, writers write because they have something to say…Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world…

My heart is bigger than my fist.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do...

A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime’s memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller’s window.

I write to escape. I haven’t managed it yet, but I’m working on it

To write is your last resort when you’ve betrayed someone.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they’re best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish – we’re famous for travelling in search of adventure.

I write to reach eternity

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

I create, therefore I am.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be wary...

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.

It takes a week to write a book, but it takes years to write a good one.

I don’t write stories, I write characters.

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make...

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I’m afraid that all of them are unprintable

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn’t. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world.

The end is everything.