However, when you're about to write something, knowing beforehand that it's sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that...

So what? All writers are unhinged!

One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring - clean…. It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came out from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked...

The person who clears the way is the one who ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis {we all have to choose our role models, as...

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.

I think someday you're going to be a great writer,

At some time during the process, {of writing} I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months...

Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have - so you can improve it. So...

Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.

Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were...

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and...

Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

Stay humble; don't interfere; respect your creative genius

Can you draw a picture on the blackboard when somebody doesn't want you to? asked the rooster promptly. Yes, answered Kenny, if you write them a very nice poem. What is an only goat? A lonely goat,...

Try saying this: "I enjoy my creativity." And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it. For one thing, it will freak people out. I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only...

You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting - its partner - and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing...

I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life.

Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that's essential or inescapable {food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and...

There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

The idea was like a hunk of wood, Caesar thought, requiring human craft and ingenuity to reveal the new shape within.

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...