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...
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashi...
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
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...
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...
If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried ali...
It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.
Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.
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.
...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.
You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch
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.
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...
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was...
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.
Writing is like a blind man building a stone house with a limited amount of space and time. Brick after brick, row after row, feeling his way round and round. Turning stones into walls, rooms and towe...
Writing, for me, makes the world shiver and flame with meaning.