I have spent a good many years sincetoo many, I thinkbeing ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line...
Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was...
Allen Ginsberg instructs: First thought, best thought. Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, 'First though...
My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.
Until you begin to write, then you see wonders.
May my mind be clear and my heart pure.
Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, wh...
Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most p...
Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is...
An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.
I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.
Books are like horcruxes--without all the evil--because a piece of the author goes into each one.
It is infinitely easier to experience an indescribable experience than to describe it.
When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.
I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
There is nothing like been consumed by the blazing fire of untold story.
Every day we live, we are writing our own secret book.
In the story of life, the prologue and epilogue are written by God. Yet the plot has been given to us; therefore we should write the best prose we can.
You can write great books, the great man continued. Or you can have kids. It's up to you.[...]Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produce...
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not fre...