All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Arrogance kills creativity.
Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.
You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.
We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.
To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10
Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.
Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
