If everyone could be a successful and rich author, there would be no point in working so hard. Where is the fun in that?
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully an...
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understa...
The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Origin...
Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.
Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are.
The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read le...
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if yo...
From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on th...
There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our wor...
Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my des...
Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.
You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.
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...
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.