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.

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, Let your characters grow. Up. And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom....

1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. {Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.}4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be wary...

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.

To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and...

Writing is defined as a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.

It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown...

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.