He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne’s vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn’t care about masterpieces, or even good paintings…...

When you are writing you’re creating beauty for mind.

I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful...

Story should be a descent — the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You...

I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception. As with several of my previous books, I have had the chance to typeset it down to the finest level of...

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a...

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

With our writings, we can right the world.

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the...

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card – the kind that has a satin ribbon on...

For every laugh, there should be a tear.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Chapter 1.He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion…no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was...

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing...

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

You’ll drown in my love story, if I ever write it using a fountain pen.

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

You are either born a writer or you are not.

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I’ve suffered, how much I’ve been through, but most importantly how far I have come.

Sometimes I’ll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I’ll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels...

I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

My writing doesn’t improve if you think it’s great, and it doesn’t lessen if you think it sucks. Likewise, you not showing me love doesn’t mean mine for you has to be invisible. The two...

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as...

You know, it’s a funny thing about writers. Most people don’t stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago–they don’t expect to...

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It’s hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a...

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it’s built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer...

Too many irons, not enough fire.

Which story do you want to hear my child?”he picked him up and made him sit on his lap.”Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of...

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it’s robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It’s like a germ planted in the...

Anyone I love takes away part of my freedom, but in that case it is I who wished it; and there is so much pleasure in loving that one gladly sacrifices something for its sake....

When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules....

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to...

Don’t analyse your muse too closely, if at all – she’ll turn away.

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters.

You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper

Oh, readers. If only you knew what we’ve gone through for you.

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore’s best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It’s hard to...

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

Disabilities are not Liabilities but true test of abilities

Don’t worry about meaning. If a story’s any good, it can’t help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.