My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.
Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.
I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always...
Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien
If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by...
Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!
Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.
Do what you love...
Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.
I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of t...
Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.
we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose...
The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a b...
Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.
Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in t...