People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were...

If you want to be a writer - - stop talking about it! Sit down and write. - Jackie Collins

The nastiest kind of writer is a ghostwriter, who bears people's children in their body for money.

"What's so great about writing?" "You can make anything true."

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

Explore the rugged edge of thought. Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.

... perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less...

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel - in - progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the...

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars...

The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will...

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive...

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and...

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a...

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality...

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back...

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right...

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not...

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that...

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would...

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men...

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.