Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.
If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either
...and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. T...
Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to...
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able...
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolute...
If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.'If you don't -blanking- get your...
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...
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
On Writing: "A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established.
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imag...
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, ev...
She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fict...
One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist...