It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energ...
You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.
I just write whenever I can.
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing autho...
Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.
Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.
We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous...
The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.
A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.
In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might...
Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.
The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. T...
Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.
Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you wa...
Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page clo...
As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn't care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my r...
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.
The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more histor...
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