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.
The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
I hate writing, I love having written.
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring s...
You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.
Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.
I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning reveale...
You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen
Stories are invented as you go along...
A writer needs solitude : moments that he can spend in introspection and in reflection. These moments make him pensive and thoughtful and help him write his thoughts with clarity. A life of devotion t...
I am a perfectionist in spirit
When in doubt, go the scandalous route.
think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to f...
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.
The irony of a writer is he/she craves privacy to pen words that crave the public.
The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.