Top On Writing Quotes

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned i...

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

I would write:The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam.Or:The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.The ol...

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what th...

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Write to your fear.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

I had come to the conclusion - based on experience - that the only real way of learning to write a novel was probably to write a novel.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will lear...

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

A book is not completed till it's read.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists...

Either give it your all or don't even try!

Easy reading is damn hard writing.