I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.
No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhe...
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach...
The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who foun...
I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It's easier to dance when you finish writing.
I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l hav...
Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.
All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten fe...
If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.
You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
...a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.
The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When yo...
Build a strong foundation and you can reach even the most unthinkable heights.
When someone gives you a constructive criticism about your thoughts, this strategy can help you to improve your thinking and writing skills that can result you to have more self respect for enhancing...
So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and t...
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
Don't let others define your dreams.