Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn't just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

Meddlers, both, we be, and always with the hope that our meddling will leave in our wake a more beautiful tapestry than that we first encountered.

Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.

The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it...

It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that...

Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Einstein famously said if at first an idea is not absurd, there's no hope for it.

I have often been asked where the inspiration for my books comes from. I wouldn’t know how to answer. On the journey of life, I accumulate experiences that get imprinted in the deepest layers of...

The time travelers are usually adept at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole...

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.

What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?

Writing a novel—actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs—is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near...

Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete - Violet 'Growth...

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under...

It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path.

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

It was a strange creative experience that deserves to be explained, even just because we know from now on how insatiable and corrosive the habit of writing is for children who want to become writers...

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its...

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

There's so much to write. Where should I start?I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are