Top On Writing Quotes

Write to your fear.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

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...

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back i...

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

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.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everythi...

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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...

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.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or w...