You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I...

It was {John Gardner's} conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous...

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show...

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does...

Hard writing makes easy reading.

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

They forget that life is not here....

I've wanted to write about them for a long while,but it's a tricky subject,always put off for laterand perhaps worthy of a better poet,even more stunned by the world than I.But time is short. I write.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests...

{T}hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid...

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his...

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... {"Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read"}

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to...

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else's dime. Nobody loved our sentences...

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences-nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been...

In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and...

Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too...

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing...

A good story is {a} kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.