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...

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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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.

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.

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

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.

. . . in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a...

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody...

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made {the record}, but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it...