"When it comes to my own work, I've long embraced piracy. I don't see piracy as any different than a friend borrowing a book from a friend, or a single book making its way through a household or a school classroom. To me, the value is in being read. The danger is in losing an audience."

"What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them."

"Photos are the perfect moment, captured in time, where you are responding to the photographer, when you are caught loving them. You can't tell me that isn't ALWAYS beautiful, because it is."

"In the emotional reaction to a work of art, you do not fill in from yourself; you leave yourself."

"Fiction is the art form of human yearning."

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

"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."

"Keep the physical limitations that some readers have in mind. Not all readers live near a bookstore, or have the eyesight for the small print of most published books, and some have no eyesight at all. Ebooks have been a boon for older readers, both for the large print and the weight reduction. Audiobooks have opened up worlds for the visually impaired. Online shopping and home delivery are the only option for millions of readers."

"It's really up to readers to decide.  We writers fill the pages, sure, but it's other folks who read and evaluate them."

"People have strong feelings about others pursuing their dreams. It's often a product of their own hopes, fears, and choices. You may have friends contact you from nowhere to encourage you. Others will question your talents, motives, and very worth as a writer."

"There's a careless optimism in the [Hollywood] executives' minds when they spend this money.  It's pin money to them, these options or development deals they make to get the script, they feel they can throw it away.  If it gets done somewhere else then they'll get some of their money back."

"There really is a thing called poetry and it should be precise and evocative."

"Nothing ever happens by accident in the fantasy world.  Some phenomenon—supernatural or magic or otherwise—is responsible.  This is the logic of fantasy."

"The short story isn’t a tree, it’s a forest, maybe a jungle, and that isn’t sufficiently recognized."

"Fashion is also an opportunity to get a message out about how you feel about the world."

"Getting a story published is almost as hard and merely a fraction as lucrative [as a novel] (if it pays anything at all), so pursue short stories only if you actually enjoy writing them."

"Writing a poem is like smashing diamonds into magic powder, or at least like smashing a bottle and then throwing the glass shards up in the air." (artist)

"We all get rejected and criticized at every stage.  Feel the hurt and let it go."

"I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind."

"Writing a novel is like building a model of the Eiffel Tower out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue—it's a complex mechanical process and a real feat of engineering, but when we get right down to it, it's kind of artificial." (artist)

"Read. This one sounds like a luxury, but if you fail to refill the well of inspiration, how will you be inspired to write words of your own?'

"Creativity itself has its own built-in discipline, the kind that, for example in a dream, can rummage through the days of the future to find precisely the data required to make a specific point."

"Craft consists of everything you've learned how to do and have internalized, but when you're actually doing it, the actions you take are both conscious and instinctive." 

"The time to start marketing is when you have lots of works to offer, or one of your works takes off, or you land a special deal somewhere with an agent or publisher or media outlet. Until then, the way to market is to be yourself and to put that self out there."

"One very well-known writer of my acquaintance sits for two hours a day on a park bench.  He says that for years he used to lie on the grass of his back garden and stare at the sky, but some member of the family, seeing him so conveniently alone and aimless, always seized the occasion to come out and sit beside him for a nice talk.  Sooner or later, he himself would begin to talk about the work he had in mind, and, to his astonishment, he discovered that the urgent desire to write the story disappeared as soon as he had got it thoroughly talked out."

"If you do want to get into creative work, you’re going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. That’s just the way it is.  It could become your main gig — if you’re very, very lucky — but the chances are slim. It’s hard to make it work."

"What people SHOULD preface their rule-dispensing [for creative pursuits] with is something like this: 'Hey, this is the way it worked for me.  Maybe it'll work for you too?  And if not, no worries.  We're still pals.'"

"Only fantasy writers are virtually forced to begin selling at novel length because the market is so much smaller for fantasy."

"Trying to be the same as everyone else is a strategy that kind of works in school.  When you get out into the world, it is differences that make you glorious."

"It's all about using everything and spinning it into something creative.  Instead of kicking against the pricks, you readjust your trajectory and go with the current.  Instead of pushing back against people you feel are attacking you, you use your opponent's momentum to disable them, much as you would in ju-jitsu."

"Find where your audience buys their books and sell there."

"Wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that."

"Skillful story technique can sell even the most outrageous premises and protagonists. Check out Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). They turned fringe into famous. You can, too."

"The Genre ('knock-knock,' 'a horse walks into a bar,' 'take my wife') sets us up for an expectation. When the payoff is inevitable, but surprising, 'orange you glad I didn't say banana,' 'Why the long face,' 'PLEASE'), we laugh."

"When the thrill of creation is its own reward, we are more inclined to create something lasting and meaningful."

"Poetry doesn't have to acknowledge the passing of time.  The poem is an object on the page in many ways.  Line length is part of the form.  You can have a poem that just walks around in a timeless state as an object."

"A permission slip [to write]: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will." (artist)

"I'm fortunate that so many major players in my early life [and memoirs] don't read books."

"One can get the false impression that stories are a necessary stepping stone to publication.  MFA programs tend to perpetuate this belief, with most fiction workshops focused on the short story form.  But if your goal is to publish a novel, you should write a novel."

"Even now, well after making the leap and publishing both fiction and researched nonfiction articles, I still get labeled as a full-time stay-at-home mom. Writing doesn't feel real to people. You get used to it."

"I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write."

"Writers don't decide what symbols mean. Symbols arise from the text."

"Success is something that must be defined on your terms.  Let no one else define it for you."

"The truly enduring stories, the narratives we encourage our friends to pick up and which happily make money for their creators over decades, the stories that outlast their creators, are the ones that reveal some core human truth."

"Writing is never a perfect art, but you can perfect the work that you put into it."

"The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world." (artist)

"Today, more than ever, we need imagination and ideas."

"My best advice on how to form this habit [of writing every day] is twofold: Get comfortable staring at a blank screen and not writing. This is a skill. If you can not write and avoid filling that time with distractions, you'll get to the point where you start writing. Open your manuscript and just be with it. Secondly, learn to write rough. Stop caring about spelling and sentence fragments and plot holes and grammar. Get the story down. Listen to the dialog and try to keep up with your fingers. Get to the end of your manuscript and THEN worry about the quality.  If you can master the art of powering through to the end of your story, you are on your way."

"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story."

"In 1974, J.D. Salinger told the New York Times that while he was still writing, publication was no longer his concern.  'There's a marvelous peace in not publishing,' he said.  'Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.'"

"I realized that if writing was going to take me away from my boys or my husband, then I wanted to find the joy and happiness in life and find ways to record that in my poems." 

"I've been lucky in that my writing's been all over the place since the beginning, so the only pigeonhole I've had to deal with is that of being a literary writer.  While I sometimes wish publishers would recognize the genre elements in certain of my novels and market them accordingly—for their own gain, as well as mine—I'm just happy to get the books between the covers."

"If you get inside the story and feel it, it doesn’t matter what age you are."

"Becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating a writer’s temperament."

"I try to share what I've learned with other magicians, just as mentors did with me.  Magicians talk quite freely about secrets within the industry, but we don't share anything with people outside of the industry.  I actually believe magicians should talk about their secrets with the public more than they do.  By keeping our art form completely secret, we're actually devaluing it."

"Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

"Every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style."

"Stop thinking about all the reasons you have not to write your memoir and what people in your family might think and just get busy writing it."

"The secret of making surrealist ideas work in books is that, once you've had the surrealist idea, you then have to take it completely literally. ... If you want these crazy things to feel real, you have to treat them as if they are real."

"It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted [in art] or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience."

"We write from our obsessions, and often they involve memories of incidents and people that we've never quite been able to resolve in any sort of satisfactory way.  These moments linger like the pea under the mattress that disturbed the princess's sleep, or the splinter under the skin that's sore when we touch it."

"'Work hard,' is not only the most important, but actually, essential. I believe that if you didn't have to work for something, it can't truly be considered success. Luck doesn't count. I think success is allowed a certain pride and you can’t be proud of luck or even of being born smart, artistic, or talented. It's what you do with it that counts."

"Fiction is able to take life and transform it and make it into something else.  By so doing, it allows us to see things about life that we wouldn't have been able to see before."

"Writing is often balanced with dozens of other obligations. Like working, cooking, cleaning, exercising, and picking up the kids from school. Nobody has the time to dedicate an entire day to just this activity. ... There is a popular misconception that successful writers have more time than the average person. That the only reason they do well is because they can spend hours each day on their books. That they don’t have to worry about pesky chores and errands like everyone else."

"The artist touched the canvas and spent time to create that, and I can feel it.  Their passion is imprisoned in their work, or maybe it's time that's embedded there, not the passion." (artist)

"Resist deep longing for approval.  One needs to write not what a public wants but what it needs.  The first kind of work is what your need for approval will generate; the second is what your struggle will bring forth."

"We were talking about Jack Nicholson, and that level of aspiration for the film [based on my novel].  What happened was a change in the hierarchy at Warner Brothers, and the people who had brought the project in no longer had power.  That was the first time that happened.  But it happened over and over.  You don't know what to believe, and you never know for sure why you're getting turned down, or even why they were interested in you in the first place."

"Even if you are a great poet, it doesn't mean the road is easy.  It's very hard and it might take a while to be recognized."

"What I have enjoyed about science fiction from the time I dove in was how it opened my natural space. If I were reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons or whatever, as I'm walking down the street, I'm thinking of the shit that I just read and the world feels a little larger. I'd be thinking that there's more layers, parallel universes and so forth. It has enhanced my view of possibilities. It's kind of like film in a way. Great writers leave space, and that gap in between is your understanding."

"You can make up any rules you want for your fantasy story—but once you set those rules, you are bound by them.  You cannot break them; you cannot change them midway through the book.  Doing that betrays the trust of the audience.  Remember: If you are creating a world, you are behaving like a god—and gods don’t cheat."

"Of course, you can't really change the world with fashion, but you can have a real impact on people's lives, their self image, and their self-expression.  Someone's mood can be improved from a special piece that brings a smile."

"Short stories are the same: they generally thrive on very severe attention. But it’s an art, not a science, so some writers ... need a certain ornateness to achieve their effect."

"Results [of the writing life] vary. Side effects range from obscurity to the Nobel Prize."

"Being a prose writer is like being a bricklayer and being a poet is like being a jewel cutter."

"My views are a natural part of my writing.  I am who I am.  That shapes how I see the world and how I narrate it.  I don't know that there's any separating one's views from one's writing.  Journalists often talk about impartiality and treat it as a holy grail—but I don't know that anyone is impartial."

"With creative people strongly gifted ... [your natural self] is very prominent, no matter what you do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

"I've come to feel that creative writing programs are havens for people who like to read."

"When you do get to create something, and you put it out for the world to see, if it’s free you’ll get a bunch of people who hate it, and if it’s not you’ll be called money hungry."

"It's clear that advice of any type—whether it's for writing great novels, making a terrific spinach soufflé, or pitching a new widget to the sales team—is anything but one-size-fits-all."

"Your reading and entertainment choices have a direct impact on your success as a writer. If your days are spent looking at the 33 Epic Selfie Fails on Buzzfeed or keeping up with the Kardashians, then you’re limiting your ability to write something great. Garbage in, garbage out.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a fiction or a nonfiction writer—reading quality books is a good habit to build."

"One surprising result of the ghettoizing of speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It's as if, having once confined us within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don't much care what we do as long as we stay behind bars. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation."

"It's OK to risk failure as you explore new ideas."

"Free is not a price. Free is a promotional effort in which you offer a sample taste of your literary heroin in order to secure the addictive loyalty of new readers. Free is temporary. Do not price free in the long-term. If your book is always free, I assume that's its value: worth zero."

"We turn to writers at times of change. If, as a society, we are future shocked and information overloaded, who better than genre writers to help us navigate through?"

"Your mother is not reading what you have written. These words are your private preserve until the day they’re published."

"Sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving."

"These core two to four thousand readers will give new writers a shot. If the writer creates something unique, the aficionado will buy the next book too. And the book after that if the second one pays off too. This is how careers were made back in the day. Still are, even with the big publishing houses abandoning core Story categories for the big book."

"I am the author of one of the most banned and challenged books in American history [The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian] and that makes me giddy with joy."

"A book on creativity that insists upon one right way misses the point."

"When writing fiction with high impact, there’s no subject matter too taboo, no character too eccentric, no emotional content too intense, no themes too difficult. It’s all in how you handle it. What overcomes all objections are characters who compel, stories that grip, and writing that amazes."

"Art comes from the place where you dream.  It comes from your unconscious.  It comes from your white-hot center."

"It is not experimental but traditional work that wins Hugo and Nebula awards within the field."

"I feel so grateful that I am an artist, that I have an art form with which to live my life and make sense of it—to start in morass and write through to clarity time and time and time again."

"In America, we place the most importance on athletics in schools.  And then academics.  The arts get dismissed.  But everything you wear, everything you sit on, any building you're in, any piece of tech you use—that was someone's creation.  That was someone's epiphany.  Every tangible thing came from the mind of an artist."

"The arts are strong and will endure, but artists need and deserve our support.  Nourish the arts, and they will nourish us right back."

"I don't think ... I have to show you, here, the relationship between archery and the writer's art.  I have already warned against thinking on targets."

"In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters.  As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power."

"Architecture is a future art—it's a system that we've built up to create the world that we want to see.  It is literally the manifestation of our civilization.  I use architecture to reframe the visual world, to improve narrative."

"When you're making images, you're exercising your right to make images.  It's a crollary to freedom of speech."

"I really dig [Franz Kafka] a lot.  Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever read.  If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there.  I’d like to direct that for sure."

"Arts education in public school is as essential as sports and math.  It's where we learn how to be people in collaboration with other people."

"I've seen teenagers just come alive with energy and joy when given the opportunity to express themselves creatively."

"The best photographs are like bottled lightning, capturing an extraordinary, unrepeatable moment."

"The power of science fiction is that you're able to experience the worst-case scenario without actually having to live it." (artist)

"I've never had much luck trying to please a specific audience.  I write for myself, in the hope that enough people will be interested and amused by the same things that interest and amuse me. ... I work for the audience, but the minute I treat them like my boss, the relationship falls apart."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."

"You write because you need to.  Period.  But you publish because you want people to read your work."

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"The problem is that America's record of translations is worse than any other western country.  Fewer than two percent of books published in America in a given year were written in a language other than English.  Fewer than two percent!  And some of those are textbooks.  If you come down to literature, it's a fraction of one percent.  And so it's very hard for American readers to even know about he work because that work is not translated or published in their language.  In England, it's not great either.  About five percent.  But in places in Western Europe, like in France, it's twenty-five percent and in Germany, it's more than thirty percent.  And so writers are able to be heard in those languages and readers are able to hear them."

"Write what you want to write.  Which is to say: Ignore the market.  Which is to say: Just because dystopian young adult fiction sells well, if that fiction doesn't light you up, write whatever does.  Which is another way of saying: Follow your bliss."

"You do not say to the creative self, 'Now it is 7:30. People are at their assembly lines. I am at my desk: produce.'"

"You don't have to be a scientist to write effective science fiction, but you do need to be enthused about the adventure of discovery."

"We need to be careful about the argument that literature always enables empathy.  There are counter-examples: Josef Goebbels, that Nazi kingpin, wrote a novel.  Knut Hamsun was a great novelist and the most unpleasant major writer of the 20th center.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer, was a crazy anti-Semite.  Ezra Pound, another great writer, had, let us say, limited resources of empathy.  I could go on with this rogue's gallery.  Literature may enable empathy, but it often doesn't.  It can't turn monsters, even monsters of genius, into good people.  That's not the business of literature." 

"Not to write, for many of us, is to die."

"The thing is, it's hard to do great creative work at the end of the day when you're tired and worn down by trying to make a living in a day job, in a business that you've founded to bring in income etc."

"The sf reader doesn't expect to receive a complete picture of the world all at once. Rather he builds up his own picture bit by bit from clues within the text. ... This, again, is one of the protocols of reading sf. The reader is expected to extrapolate, to find the implied information contained in new words."

"The downside to institutionalizing creative writing involves institutional bad faith: for the sake of enrollments, you may be encouraging people with little or no talent.  My impression is that physicists don't encourage people who can't do math, just for the sake of enrollments."

"I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy.  Two days and I am in tremor.  Three and I suspect lunacy.  Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.  An hour's writing is tonic.  I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats."

"I write because I'm passionate about it, and I love it. It's not going away. I could have a readership of zero and I'd still be here. ... It's something I do for the sake of doing it, because I want to do it. And that's what creative work is becoming."

"Write often enough that you don't lose your rhythm or forget what you're up to.  That might mean writing every other day.  Or only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  If you're thinking about your work and reading a lot during that in-between time, it can help make those less-than-every-day writing sessions as productive as an every-day 'Must-Do!' writing routine (which can start to feel like drudgery pretty darn fast)."

"In practical terms, you'll have a better chance selling to the [sf genre] magazines if your story is (1) short and (2) science fiction rather than fantasy. My career followed that track; so did the careers of most other science fiction writers in the field."

"There's an old adage in Hollywood, 'Ready, fire, aim'."

"An abandoned story at page one or page 356 has the same value as a story you never wrote in the first place."

"Where it all came from—the other mother with her button eyes, the rats, the hand, the sad voices of the ghost-children—I have no real idea. It built itself and told itself, a word at a time."

"Some of the criticism may be accurate; some might be completely off. But no matter what anyone says, it will not be your own idea, so you will have to keep those external notions at bay."

"The Professional writer, whether consciously or subconsciously, knows exactly where his idea sits on the Literary and Commercial spectrum long before he starts to work."

"The antidote to fear is to continually, one day at a time, stay out of the result and place ourselves squarely in the process."

"Some might argue that novels shouldn't have to have a great ending, that we should just enjoy spending time with the characters.  Sorry ... We demand great endings of our movies and our plays, and we'll continue to do so of our novels."

"If there were a manifesto for 21st century fiction writers, I hope it would go like this: Down with high-flown literature! Cast off genre servitude! The revolution is founded in authorial liberty. It regards story and art as equals."

"Art does NOT come from the mind.  It does not come from your rational, analytical faculties.  It does not come from ideas.  It does not come from theories.  It does not come from philosophies.  You don't write a book in order to express a theme or make symbols.  That's NOT the process."

"Perhaps you feel the urge to be your own boss, to promote your own works, and you'd rather not have someone else earn royalties on your hard-won promotional efforts.  So you self-publish.  And you are delighted with that decision."

"Simple exposure doesn't make us great dog people any more than reading a lot of books automatically makes us great writers."

"It's optional.  Writers should only engage in social media if they want to.  If you don't want to or if you're doing it halfheartedly, it shows.  I think it's important for writers to not think in terms of platform.  It's not healthy. ... Yes, I have a platform, and it would be disingenuous to deny that.  But in terms of getting to that place, I was just myself."

"Short fiction satisfies my writing itch because it's such a beautiful craft.  A good story doesn't try to do lots and lots of things.  It does one thing well.  Sometimes that is a most splendid thing."

"When I go to literary conferences that are non-genre, if it's just a broad literary conference, and I say I write literary horror, they respond, 'I can't read that stuff.'  I'm supposed to just say, 'I understand.'  I met a writer who does historical British non-fiction, from a specific time period.  If I'd said, 'I don't read anything before 1700,' I would be a jerk."

"Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths." (artist)

"Elliot Fried ... told me that if I wanted to be told what to write, journalism would be fine, but if I wanted to write what I wanted, then I should enroll in his novel writing workshop.  And so I did, and that class changed my life forever."

"Readers also need to be free to read whatever they like and be able to publicly discuss them and to publicly make their demands known."

"I know a lot of authors who are saying 'no' to offers because publishers want all the rights, and nobody wins in that scenario."

"I hope that whoever reads my work, no matter the subject matter, will be able to tell that this poet is so clearly in love with the animals and plants and mysteries of this planet and tried to do her very best to get you to feel the same way too." (camera owner)

"No one wants to buy a [self-help] book that proclaims such a measured, modest message from its cover.  To sell big, you have to over-promise."

"Writing and publishing are two very different acts, and the two are not as connected as might be assumed."

"You have to do it better or different that it's been done before, otherwise there's no point doing it.  But that challenge is what makes writing a book ... so much fun."

"Magic is a fascinating and primal thing.  What's most interesting is the psychology behind it.  People are desperate to experience wonder.  We are desperate to find mystery in our lives.  I believe it's innate; it's so hard-wired into our brains that we can't escape it."

"The stupid conclusion that if he cannot write easily he has mistaken his career is sheer nonsense."

"We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art."

"You can't lie to yourself if you're going to be a memoirist.  Our personal failures and limitations and weak or fragile spots are the most interesting things to read about.  Again, it comes back to telling the truth as opposed to the thing we wish were true or ought to be true or assume at first glance to be true.  I think a memoirist really has to be willing to—not necessarily comfortable with—revealing their deepest emotions, motivations, and actions on the page for anyone to view and judge."

"I usually listen to [a book] in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch."

"We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know."

"In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kinds of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."

"We can use strategies derived from what we know about narrative to give our non-narrative essays more resonance."

"Readers don't have time for anything but the really good stuff, and the writer needs to deliver on page one."

"When you're writing your first book, nobody really cares, except you.  It's totally self-motivated.  Writing [my second book] was the toughest thing I've ever done."

"I love reading fiction, but I can hardly stand to listen to a fiction writer talk about his or her book—it's like a painter talking about his painting or a composer describing a symphony.  You want to read the novel, you want to see the painting, you want to hear the music—you don't want to hear a lot of talk about it."

"[Writing] akes a long time.  There is no rushing it, and the work exists on its own timetable, outside of your own personal deadlines."

"I think everyone should sing and that everyone should write.  Like reading, these should be broadly accepted as social practices and not as fine arts."

"It was especially severe as a student in my overly competitive MFA program at the University of Iowa.  We students were pitted against each other and competed for praise, merit scholarships, and teaching jobs.  Most workshops, I'd leave in tears."

"I've also been at writers' summer workshops where really the model is setting one young writer against another.  I find that appalling.  Writing is not the WWE."

"What loafing does for my creative process: I get many of my brainstorms when I'm doing something totally unrelated to the diligence of the butt-in-chair calcified advice that many new writers receive."

"In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in.  It musn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own."

"With Art as forceps, pull that Truth."

"From my own experiences I've learned that quirky, different, fringe projects that may only be cult, often travel a lot better internationally. Mainstream comedians and TV shows that might be the biggest thing, on say, UK TV for a while, often don't sell a sausage around the world. Comics selling out arenas in the UK often can't sell a ticket in America or many other places."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"The bulk of your writing should focus on genres or niches that you enjoy. Sure, there will be times when you write to pay the bills, but spend most of your days on exciting projects."

"Writing 20 books in your career is wonderful; I wish I had written as much.  But ultimately I'd rather write the best book I can write no matter how long it takes me than the best book I can write fast simply because the unrelenting pace of our society demands speed in all things. "

"Story's important, so don't let it get buried with words."

"When you write a love poem, the happy love poem, readers might be thinking 'screw you, I don't care.'  When you write a love poem, there has to be the awareness of the fragility of life that you could lose this person at any moment, or this person could leave, or you could die.  You have to have some shadow to prop up the poem; otherwise, it becomes sentimental, and you don't want sentimentality.  You want sentiment but not sentimentality."

"You go in with these extremely high hopes.  I don't know why after a while you have those hopes, because it's very hard to continue to be serious about writing screenplays.  You get cynical, and you feel like the money's the only thing."

"Every great writer was once a beginner.  Remember that.  Don't beat yourself up for not knowing something.  Go out and learn it."

"I just remember getting bashed for them. But what is funny is that someone will bash them, then pick one out and say 'this one was the exception' and then another person will be bashing them and that won't be their exception, a different one'll be their exception. ... Some of those albums that people say were so bad are among my favorites."

"Find Art.

Seize brush.  Take stance.  Do fancy footwork.  Dance.

Run race.  Try poem.  Write play."

"The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library."

"We should always be changing and inspired by new things."

"Beginning writers almost always underedit."

"Reading is fuel for the imagination.  Reading is inspiring.  Reading is relaxing.  Reading is a way to keep this 'art' part of your brain active between writing sessions."

"I used to worry about [negative criticism of my work] until I realized that if you look at the great attacks on literature in the last hundred years or so, they were almost all carried out by people who had not read the work in question."

"Write when you want to write. Write when you don't want to write. Write when the sun is shining and when it rains. Don't write when the tornado's on the way. Take shelter."

"Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations."

"I have always wanted to write mysteries, ever since I was a little girl growing up in rural Indiana.  We used to ride our ponies to the library and fill up the saddlebags with books, and then read up on the hayloft of the barn behind our house.  I fell in love with Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Drew.  And that's when I decided I wanted to either be a detective or a mystery author."

"Untalented writers may feel cheated and lied-to if they can't get published, if they don't have good lives as writers.  Which is why you have to tell everybody at the outset that no creative writing program can guarantee a career, or publications, or anything except for some close readings and guidance."

"Writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed."

"Let me tell you, people spend a lot less on writing than they do on music. How does a writer live, on the money we're talking right now?"

"A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints."

"Kids shouldn't grow up thinking that the only thing of any importance is earning money.  They should be learning about culture, not business."

"People Are Going To Steal Your Book: The current generation is used to open access, not restricted ownership. Someone is going to gank your book. They're gonna gank the unmerciful fuck out of it. And you're either going to be mad about it and flail or you're going to find a way to deal and, in a perfect world, make it work for you."

"This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day. This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary."

"I've used more than one non-sentence in this article alone, and the Grammar Police haven't come after me yet.  If it sounds right to your ears and it works for readers, leave it alone.  Even if it's a fragment."

"There's a cycle in science fiction that most writers follow. They break into the field by selling short stories and novelettes to the magazines until their names and styles become familiar to book editors. Then they sign a few book contracts, get some novels under their belts, and suddenly they don't have time for those $400 stories anymore. The magazines that nurtured them and gave them their starts watch as the novels flow and the short fiction trickles in. So the magazines are forced to search constantly for new talent."

"You feel very alive constantly being one decision away from disaster."

"Most readers just plain don't care who publishes someone, whether it's you, a Random Penguin, or some magic coyote hobo."

"Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it."

"I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren't any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for."

"By Story’s end, the listener or reader or watcher has to be at the very least surprised and satisfied by the payoff of the Story’s initial promise."

"When we show our work too soon, we are abdicating authority over it. Certainly there comes a point where we need a fresh eye, but until we have done all we can do, we jeopardize our relationship to our initial impulse."

"Who cares if you can’t be classified? The imaginations that matter are those glued to your pages."

"I love short stories.  Imagine holding a small carved bowl, its weight and shape and size a perfect fit for two cupped hands.  The grain of the wood flows with teh bowl's curves.  The interplay of light and dark pleases the eye.  The texture is silken against your skin.  You turn it, admiring the craft the artistry, and the detail.  'It's lovely,' you say, handing it back to its creator.  Then you say, 'Now when are you going to make something real, like furniture?'  Now imagine the bowl is a short story.  Why do so many readers and writers consider short stories to be some sort of training wheels?  As if writing a short story is just a way of wobbling around until you find your balance, and are ready for the big-girl bike of a novel?"

"I went to ... a great theater school.  And despite a lot of success, I decided I wanted to write instead of interpret."

"It's still very possible to make money writing pure spectacle—there will always be a brisk market for porn and explosions."

"Everyone works differently.  I'm sure for new writers, it's frustrating to hear the answer to the 'How do you do it?' questions is that everyone works differently.  But I also take comfort from that.  You've got to find what works for you."

"I also go out in the afternoons to shoot photographs.  I find that the process of training the eye to compose in the viewfinder helps me hone my ability to revise poems.   I've always loved the connections and cross-pollination between art forms."

"The only places I feel most at home in, exist in my 'portable world'; those democratic spaces where my kith and kin from the Republics of Imagination and Ideas reside."

"It is this heart we need for our own writing—one that moves to understand and expresses a deep connection to life, which is also what I take essayist to mean." 

"There are thousands of editors out there looking for work. The big publishers use a lot of freelance editors these days. I can hire the same people I might end up with if I were to go the traditional route, pay them once, and still retain ownership and control over my work."

"If I was writing about a crow feather, I wanted to make sure I got the shape exactly right, the right point and feel.  This began my incorporating research into my poetry, and to this day, I still do a lot of research to make sure I always portray the natural world correctly." (artist)

"We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day."

"The urge to produce another—to redeem the first book by writing a second—led to my own spurt of inefficient frenzy, which didn't result in anything of worth.  I was stalled, not be writer's block, but by the conviction that whatever I wrote had to be of superior worth."

"I never read, particularly, a mystery or a romance or a sci-fi.  I just read anything.  When I started out [writing], I don't think I had the concept of 'They must be shelved somewhere.'"

"I encourage writers to not look at their reviews, and I usually don't." (artist)

"I see major thematic and even dramatic similarities between all my books.  In novels, there's no masking one's interests and obsessions."

"Instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked."

"Magic is such a raw, emotional experience, and it can be used as a storytelling device.  Sometimes people scream and run away—what a profound effect!  There is no other art form that can do that.  You cannot make somebody gasp, scream, and run away by looking at a painting or watching a dance routine."

"To preach that story is conflict, always to ask 'where's the conflict in your story?'—this needs some thinking about.  If you say that story is about conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely.  And, in a sense, making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters.  This is simply untrue.  To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one.  Conflict, of course, is part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood.  Stories are about a lot of different things."

"The ingredients for making a successful work to me are imagination, idea, composition, skill and dedication."

"My books are always a process of discovery.  I almost never have any idea what I'm doing until I'm actually doing it.  In fact, I think every time I've had a plan or an idea, it has been entirely sidelined by whatever I uncover while writing."

"I want people to like the work, not me."

"If you're playing a movie on a phone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You'll think you have experienced it, but you'll be cheated. It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real."

"The reporting of facts ... rarely contains the whole truth.  I say this because facts involve people and people are made up of contradictions.  The reporting of what happened rarely includes the more important question of what the story means to the people who stand at its center."

"I'm a strong believer that creativity is the ability to play."

"Good fiction is not trying to imitate life or trying to reproduce what's going on in life.  Life serves as a catalyst, as a provocation that leads to something fictional that's interesting.  It creates a new world that has its own constraints, its own rules, and its own system that can really be intersting in and of itself.  It can also come back and teach us something about life.  There is a constantly circulating movement in the interchange between life and fiction."

"It's important to feed your mind with quality information daily. Only then is it possible to come up with great book ideas."

"In the long run, then, whatever is published within the field of science fiction and fantasy is science fiction and fantasy, and if it doesn't resemble what science fiction and fantasy were twenty years ago or even five years ago, some readers and writers will howl, but others will hear the new voice and see the new vision with delight."

"I always urge young writers who feel the pressure to produce to spend more time browsing bookstores.  I urge them to check how many books any writer tends to have on the shelf.  Ours is a culture where it's lucky for a writer to be remembered for even one book, less three or four."

"The usual negative attitude toward anything that you present to folks in Hollywood: They say 'no' all the time; very rarely do they say 'yes.'  They're in the business of saying 'no;' they're in the business of not making movies."

"There's no substitute for being a prodigal reader, for knowing the unlimited things that can be done with words on a page."

"It's OK to go into hibernation sometimes.  Your friends will understand.  Your freelance gigs will understand.  You're writing a book, you don't need to feel like, 'if I can't balance everything, I'm not good enough."

"We're taught that an essay is a document that proves or answers.  I go back to the word's Latin root, which means 'to try.'  Not 'to give an answer,' but 'to try.'  Sometimes an essay offers an answer, but asking questions is just as important.  A good essay promotes conversation."

"Be interesting, and be interesting in the first paragraph."

"Stay curious, look for inspiration in everything, and write it down.  You never know when you have a seed that you'll come back to."

"Today, there is an over-sharing of our lives. ... I'm not on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm actually a private person.  I don't engage in any social media.  To me, it's really interesting how we negotiate the private life, the private self, and what we make public.  For me, it's easier to make 'art' public than just the day-to-day, blow-by-blow ad nauseam of every day life."

"Fantasy is about the assignment of consciousness and reason.  In fantasy, everything is conscious, or at least potentially conscious—animals, plants, rocks, machines, the wind.  Everything."

"Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut."

"We did lose some shops who only want to carry American-made goods, but we really don't view the world like that.  We feel more like citizens of the world, and we're wary of nationalist leanings.  It has made our brand stronger, improving the quality, but also providing a huge well of inspiration; the colors, textiles, and techniques we've learned in India have expanded our vocabulary greatly."

"The short story is usually about one thing. ... I think this is the great relief of the short story."

"I know, if you're a writer, you're constantly asked to take positions.  So don't do it without doing your homework."

"Don't be pretentious about your writing habits. Don't tell yourself that you'll only write on days when you have three uninterrupted hours to devote to the enterprise. Grab any half-hour you can."

"Every story has at least a little truth in it. Every story comes from somewhere." 

"[The author] then speaks in [his work] for all peoples, for the united psyches that overflow with thoughts and feelings that are registered by the wind, giving voice to the private, intimate, yet connected lives of men and women throughout the centuries—so that many people, listening to or reading the [author's work], hear their own inner voices also, and feel the contours of their own natures, and universal nature as well."

"Someone who gets to college without ever having loved a book is almost a hopeless case."

"While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."

"How many people could tell you how much money they’ve given to their favourite artists or writers or creators? Not to platforms, not to businesses, to actual creatives?"

"'You should write every day': that's a terrific idea... in theory.  I should also swim 20 laps every day, mow my lawn twice a month, and grade student papers the moment they're turned in.  But like you, I'm busy and don't do all the things I ought to do when I 'should' do them.  I accept that."

"My experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little." (artist)

"Something Ben Stiller had said to me a few years earlier: 'When you're on a film set and you've got to make endless decisions, you have to realise that you can't be worried about people's feelings.'"

"Your stories are your world; they're what help you do this thing that you love."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"Everything changes when we read."

"Despite all of their desire to live by their own lone wolf ways, ironically what amateur writers really want is a recipe. And certainty. And guarantees."

"The art of storytelling involves a willingness to surrender our idea of the way the story should be told, for the way it actually wants to be told."

"For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn't matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction."

"For Lynch … His refusal to interrogate the images, sounds and ideas that make themselves known to him—often during the actual process of shooting—accounts not only for their uniqueness, but also for his occasional inability to articulate their precise meaning.  His desire is to 'speak directly' through the films, combined with a faith in the audience's own eyes and ears."

"The 'how' of what that process is down there, I have no idea.  All I know is that characters keep emerging, voices keep speaking to me, and I keep writing them down."

"The traditional [book publishing] market can be impossible, it can be icy, it can be illogical and downright cruel.  I have seen it knock down oodles of talented writers."

"[Unlike books devoted to writing,] books written for painters do not imply that the chances are that the reader can never be anything but a conceited dauber, nor do textbooks on engineering start out by warning the student that because he has been able to make a grasshopper out of two rubber bands and a matchstick he is not to think that he is likely ever to be an honor to his chosen profession."

"Writing novels seems tailor-made for people suffering from bipolar disorder or for roller coaster designers."

"I had an offer of a small advance and a traditional contract, which meant someone else paying for the publishing, providing editing, cover art, marketing, all of that. I was sure I'd never get another offer, and I loved the editor I was in contact with, so I took the deal. I learned a lot from that, but I also saw that all the tools for publishing were available to anyone, so I went on my own with the second book. I even went back and acquired the rights to my first novel. I've been self-publishing ever since. Even now, when I have publishers asking for the next thing I write, I choose to self-publish."

"We are often called to go deeper in our writing, but I think we should also move outwards, from the particular to the universal—centrifugally moving bigger, wider, and expansively so."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves."

"With its never-ending stream of reboots and sequels, modern culture has heightened the ideal that artists have a duty to capitalize on success."

"I had the privilege of saying my body was healthy for crying out loud, and ... I should make the most of my time and marvel at all I could and just sit myself down at the desk.  And so I did."

"Writers are a pretty insecure bunch, but I've never met one who blames their sales on their bad writing."

"Most experienced performers will say that they don't get nervous.  I don't get nervous anymore because everything that can be go wrong in my shows has already happened.  I've knocked my table over.  I've had an audience volunteer start crying.  I've had props break.  I've injured myself.  Literally anything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and now I know what to do when it does."

"I hear what I write.  I started writing poetry when I was really young.  I always hear it in my head.  I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual.  But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."

"Ever since my childhood I always feel someone is standing with me when I work.  It guides and leads me, and criticizes what I have painted.  It calls my attention to the beauty of anything that could be the personification of sensibility.  I am not sure what it is, but it is always there."

"As a general rule, I won't ever cut anything because I feel it makes me 'look bad' or is personally humiliating.  I am impervious to those considerations.  I lack a sense of personal discretion or protection in my work because I feel like, if this is what I do for a living, I have to do it 100 percent or not at all."

"It may take weeks or months to research an investigative story for television, I can write the script in one day.  If pressed, I could write the script in an hour.  But there is no way I could write a novel in any less time than, say, nine months.  No matter how much pressure there is. ... It is much more layered, textured, complicated.  And it is all from my imagination."

"Conflicting feelings snare readers. They're a puzzle that demands solution, a cognitive dissonance that's too noisy to ignore."

"It makes them happy to give [lifetime achievement awards] to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don't know that."

"It's good to go a little crazy every once in a while.  Keeps the reader off balance."

"As we read [essays], we participate in the writer's attempt to find what he or she didn't know when first coming to the page."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"I take a certain amount of godlike pleasure in toying with readers and sort of rubbing my hands and going, 'They're never going to figure this one out.'"

"If you do something peculiar and remarkable it might not be for mass consumption in your own country but there are 7 billion people in the world. People everywhere in the world will recognize and appreciate its innovation. A world cult is many times bigger than a single country's mainstream hit. So in the long run, being different can make commercial sense as well as artistic sense."

"Fiction starts as speculation.  Writers don't go to the obvious speculation."

"That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita.  Style, she says, is rhythm—'the wave in the mind'—the wave, the rhythm, are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it."

"Doing is being.

To have done's not enough;

To stuff yourself with doing—that's the game.

To name yourself each hour by what's done,

To tabulate your time at sunset's gun

And find yourself in acts

You could not know before the facts"

"Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."

"All writing is great training for writing.  Of course one learns specific things writing in a specific genre, and some of those skills carry over from one form to another."

"I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't."

"Not only am I rarely creatively satisfied, but satisfaction comes with small victories.  There's usually more frustration than applause or happiness."

"There is no way [writing] students are going to get better without reading.  You must know who your literary parents are and who your grandparents are."

"Almost all fantasy relies on personification—that is, whatever happens in a fantasy, there is an anthropomorphic reason, a causative agency."

The 90-Day Novel

"Whether it's through an Instagram post or documentary film, the heart of the mission is constant: our job is to tell a story.  I'm eager to see what other avenues open up to tell those stories."

"I realized early on that you can really elevate your surroundings in the decisions you make concerning decor, clothing, etcetera.  Design is the key to all of that."

"Your job [as an actor] is to create an interesting, captivating character that serves the text.  That's it."

"Writing is like having a baby. If you wait until you can afford to spare the time, you'll never do it."

"I think that the short story has a tendency to prove people who pronounce [negatively] on it foolish."

"There are gasps and shouts, even some violinistic cries. He has sent several people scurrying to the woods in fear, which is unfortunate, but it is the sort of thing that happens when one finds the words that truly come from within oneself."

"Every story ever told really happened."

"[You] tried to use an assembly-line kind of time for your creative productivity. This may work when manuscripts are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall you are using the 'wrong' approach to time, particularly for any creative artist."

"Sometimes some songs take years to get right. You do it and you just know it's not right and you can't get it right so you leave it. I think you can only do your best with it and sometimes your best isn't good enough. At which point you have to give it a rest. Because then you start doing really strange things to it. And when it starts going that far astray it's time to go away from it."

"You need to hit teens right between the eyes with a good book; they'll never get over it."

"When you ask a science fiction question, the first thing you have to do is root it in reality; you have to explain to yourself why it's possible, so you can believe in it yourself."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.  It cannot precede action.  It is the chart that remains when an action is through.  That is all Plot ever should be.  It is human desire let run, running, and reach a goal.  It cannot be mechanical.  It can only be dynamic."

"Sometimes, in our creative frenzy, we were not even conscious of what we were writing."

"If you tell people you're an artist, they'll tell you that’s not much of a career path and you should get a real job.  If you tell people you're building a tech startup platform for artists, they'll be impressed and want to hear more."

"If you're truly worried about sounding too much like a specific author, read outside of your genre when you're writing."

"All these [sf genre] magazines pride themselves on publishing stories from new writers. What doesn't get told quite as often is that they survive by discovering new writers."

"Like Cliffhanger.  More people have seen how they did the helicopter shot in that than people have seen the movie!  Magicians keep their secrets to themselves.  And they know that as soon as they tell, someone will say, 'Are you kidding me?  That's so simple."  It's horrifying to me, that they do that.  People don't realize it, but as soon as they hear or see that, something dies inside them.  They're deader than they were.  They're not, like, happy to know about this stuff.  They're happy not to know about it.  And they shouldn't know about it.  It's nothing to do with the film!  And will only ruin the film!  Why would they talk about it?"

"There are also amazing highs; a fantastic piece of dialogue, a great idea, a shot that really works.  You have to hang on to those moments and learn to push the anxiety away."

"The thing to remember is all must be subservient to the content. Be generative. Create. All else is slave to that; your writing is not slave to anything."

"You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and content, of great books of the past."

"The more you read, the more nuggets you file away, the more gold in your stores, the richer your writing will be."

"It's not one-to-one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."

"The best way to learn whether your Story is reaching people is to tally the number of them willing to part with their hard-earned cash to experience your work."

"We never want to force our story into our idea of how it should be structured. Our original impulse was valid. We can trust it and return to it over and over again, even as the story continues to be reshaped."

"It's the darker things I find really beautiful.  I guess I haven't learned to paint the lighter parts of life in a way that's pleasing to me, although I think it can be done—Rousseau does it, and so does Richard Diebenkorn." (artist)

"At genre conventions the debate over genre boundaries is almost a sport. Only two conclusions seem to me certain: Genre writers don't get enough respect, and when they do they don't get much respect from genre writers."

"Artists are not intellectuals.  We are sensualists, we are ravenous for life."

"The antihero is always going to come back because it's an easy crutch.  It also appeals to people in the film business.  Especially the film business, because it's an immoral business."

"It's like the Japanese with the garden.  Nature is doing all this stuff, and all they do is maybe take a branch and trim it, impose their will on it, and make it grow a certain way.  And they prune, and they keep certain things out.  But the plants are doing most of the work.  It's a two-way street–nature and man working together.  And in painting, the paint has got a texture and it sort of wants to be a certain way.  And a brush is so artificial, and it makes tiny little lines.  After you make a whole bunch of brush strokes, it's something else.  It's not the paint talking, it's too much of the person.  So you've gotta let accidents and strange things happen—let it work, so it's got an organic sort of quality."

"Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do."

"Fantasy looks like the abandonment of the laws of science. ... That's what it looks like.  Dig deeper.  Like science fiction, fantasy also starts out with an if."

"Life would be perfect if I had hours each day to read for fun.  In truth, most of the books I read are within my own genre.  I need to stay up-to-date on the books being published in children's fiction in order to be able to come up with books my publisher will buy.  That's my first priority.  When I read for fun, usually it's in audiobook format, and I'm almost exclusively listening to books written by those who are much more accomplished than I am." 

"To pretend self-publishing is never the right option, and that all writers who self-publish are talentless hacks who slap a book together and call it art?  Friends, that is dangerously close-minded thinking."

"Sharon Olds said that if you write down something and put it out into the world, it's a little murder.  It just is.  If you write down something and you put it in a drawer, it's a little suicide."

"An idea I was exposed to in art school: it's adamant that you enjoy the process more than the end product.  And that rule applies to all the arts, because we're fickle people."

"What narrative teaches us about characterization: we are all made up of contradictions, and, as a result, we are all somewhat unknowable.  We are capable of surprise precisely because of this fact."

"Open book after book devoted to the writer's problems: in nine cases out of ten you will find, well toward the front of the volume, some very gloomy paragraphs warning you that you may be no writer at all, that you probably lack taste, judgment, imagination, and every trace of the special abilities necessary to turn yourself from an aspirant into an artist, or even into a passable craftsman.  You are likely to hear that your desire to write is perhaps only an infantile exhibitionism, or to be warned that because your friends think you a great writer (as if they ever did!) the world cannot be expected to share that fond opinion.  And so on, most tiresomely.  The reasons for this pessimism about young writers are dark to me."

"I love magic tricks.  But the reason I like them so much is because it's possible to change the way someone thinks about the world through a magic trick.  It is possible to do that through other art forms, too, but it's not so immediate."

"Judgment by genre is just wrong—stupid, wasteful.  Most people know that now."

"Save up and invest in your work. Pay yourself a dollar for every 500 words you write. Set that aside, and you'll have enough to publish your book when you're done with it."

"Much like the mind of its maker or of any human being, the essay is mutable and free flowing, wandering and multifaceted, and surprising in the connections it makes.  These surprises cause the reader to feel as if she is inside the mind of the writer, following his thoughts as they spin and swivel, pivot and progress.  Its nature is personal, born of individual emotions, reasoning, and affectations that give it heart and humanity.  Essays, whether we oblige or not, welcome us into their arms."

"To this day, the Slow Food movement wants diners and chefs to challenge themselves by taking their time and making every meal a hedonistic experience.  Should we ask any less from ourselves as writers—or from those who choose to read what we make?"

"Yes, absolutely it has to surprise us.  Surprise is the very basis of art.  Isn't it?"

"If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale."

"I often start something and have no idea how it'll end.  The sense of surprise there, to me, is like magic every time." 

"One of the benefits I get from doing [book] covers is, I get to read.  The main thing I like about what I do is that I'm away from reality and the real world where I live, in a make believe one—a land of someone else's imagination—as long as the project lasts.  I need that to survive." (artist)

"Hemingway said that stories are never finished, they're simply due."

"The key for me in writing character is finding out who are the most important people in my characters' lives, and what they wish they could make clear to them."

"The practice of writing is a kind of self-instruction that no number of writing workshops can teach you.  You have to learn how to do it yourself.  The writing makes you a writer, it builds your discipline, enhances your talent, and draws froth the reserves of your character."

"I don't think one has to have a 'dysfunctional childhood' in order to write a fascinating memoir, but there definitely needs to be something.  And that 'something' could even be a gift for the observation of tiny, daily life."

"News stories are compelling mysteries.  Life is a compelling mystery.  The key of a compelling mystery is—as it is in journalism—to constantly advance the story.  No tangents, no digressions, no fancy tricked-up writing. Just a straight-ahead and irresistible tale."

"I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hard copy."

"I don't like formulas.  I don't like novels where I know the ending halfway through."

"The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reflect the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews.  He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation.  He must ask himself, 'What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?' and begin to pour this on paper." (artist)

"The broadest, most inoffensive, mainstream hits are so often the least 'talked about.' They just happen and wash over a disconcerting majority once a week. Again, this is fine if you just want commercial success but it's soul destroying if you have loftier ambitions."

"One of the reasons a lot of us read fiction—including me—is that we respond to characters in fiction as if we are responding to people.  We can have intense reactions to them.  We can enjoy them as people."

"As you create your story, it takes on a reality of its own—and as you explore its workings, you metamorphose.  Your thinking changes, your perceptions shift, you become a different person: You become the kind of person who can tell this story from the inside.  If you succeed, then the way you describe events and places and characters will be as a resident would describe it, and it will feel to the reader as if you've been there yourself."

"You can tell without even reading if the book you've chosen is apt to be easy or hard, right? Easy books contain lots of short paragraphs—including dialogue paragraphs which may only be a word or two long—and lots of white space. They're as airy as Dairy Queen ice cream cones. Hard books, ones full of ideas, narration, or description, have a stouter look. A packed look. Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent."

"Want to come up with great book ideas? Looking to improve your writing skills? Hoping to turn your writing into a profitable business? Then be a reader!"

"I can spend weeks without mentioning to anyone that I'm a writer.  I'm a minority these days, but I'm not certain it's a good thing for writers to spend a lot of time with other writers.  Solidarity and community are essential—I am not arguing against either—but when the majority of your friends are writers ... that seems to work for a lot of people, but that shit's just not for me."

"You're very fortunate if you have a partner who understands what you do and who works with you through the struggle of making and wanting to make."

"To give a sense of place, to me, is a thrilling thing. And a sense of place is made up of details. And so the details are incredibly important. If they're wrong, then it throws you out of the mood. And so the sound and music and color and shape and texture, if all those things are correct and a woman looks a certain way with a certain kind of light and says the right word, you're gone, you're in heaven. But it's all the little details."

"More than ever I see still and moving images becoming one and the same.  Having experience and vision in both mediums will be crucial for most people over the coming years."

"I'm constantly taking risks to move forward.  I believe that you have to go for what you want and figure the rest out later.  That's a good way of looking at the world: do what you feel is the best thing to move you forward, and don't let potential future pitfalls hold you back.  You can cross those bridges when you get there—everything will work itself out."

"You need life experience. ... You can't tell someone how to think and feel in it, you have to be in it."

"Francis Bacon is, to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter.  There's a lot of painters that I like.  But for just the thrill of standing in front of a painting… I saw Bacon's show in the sixties at the Marlborough Gallery and it was really one of the most powerful things I ever saw in my life." (artist)

"It's always about execution. If I told you that I was going to write a story about a man who wakes up and finds he has turned into a beetle, there's a good chance you'd think it was a stupid idea. But Kafka has the power to make that not only a good story, but one that's actually shaped the way we think about short stories. ... Part of the answer is something about conviction, something about summoning the authority."

"Write. Write when you can, as much as you can. ... Write every day."

"[He] was not just a storyteller, he was a story. And story is resilient, protean, eternal."

"It's easy to be fooled into thinking there's a magic program, a specific path that only others know about, or a unique but mysterious road that you should take with a set number of steps to reach your dreams.  Nonsense.  You decide when.  You decide how."

"Expression is a necessity of life. ... Each person feels that drive."

"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."

"The teaching of poetry has almost disappeared from the curricula of many English departments, and the AWP conferences have become a refuge for people who want to talk about poetry."

"Drawing was very therapeutic for me.  It has always been an outlet for me to stay away from the tougher parts of life."

"Nicki Minaj, for example, has 77,000,000 Instagram followers consuming her free social content. 77,000,000 followers, and her last album sold 800,000 copies.  That means that barely 1% of her followers actually purchased an album. The rest? Streaming it, YouTubing it, just following without buying.  If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?"

"The claim some young writer makes each semester to me [is] that they don't want to read the writing of anyone else because it might damage their own creativity and squelch their voice.  Hard to believe, I realize, but I get myopic Kurt Vonnegut wannabes in my classes all the time. ... Reading helps [writers] find their own voice."

"That doesn't mean I'll just do whatever it takes to be paid. Especially not something like abandoning my professional standards, because that would throw the rest of my life out of balance."

"The Art Spirit that sort of became my Bible, because that book made the rules for the art life.  It was one of those things that is so fantastic, because it sets you on your way."

"Fantasy is not the abandonment of logic.  It is the reinvention of it.  A believable fantasy is the creation of an alternate structure of logic."

"Everywhere we look: problems.  Everywhere we further look: solutions.  The children of men, the children of time, how can they not be fascinated with these challenges?  Thus: science fiction and its recent history."

"New writers are, if anything, even more welcome in the magazines. The appetite for new writers in the field of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) is still enormous. If you write competently and if your story has any spark of life, you will sell it."

"Creating music comes from a place of complete subjectivity, and that's the way it should be.  It starts from a place of having to be so in touch with yourself, your emotions, your perspective.  And there's a satisfaction that comes out of creating, which I think is selfish, but not in a negative way.  What you then do with the influence you may gain from putting that into the world is where you can really contribute to something beyond yourself."

"There are no rules.  The creative process is as mysterious and as personal as each of us. "

"Not everyone in the movie business can do comedy; certainly not everyone understands it."

"Sometimes even still you get that look, as if the person listening is thinking, oh, you're one of THOSE. Here's a radical notion, then: get shut of the term 'self-published.' Forget 'indie.' Forget 'DIY.' Just be an author when you're being an author. Just be a publisher when you're being a publisher. (Or, go with a term I quite like, 'author-publisher.') People ask you what you do, you write books. People ask who you're published with, give them the name of your one-man publishing company. Or say, 'I did that shit myself.'"

"That's what it’s like when you're creating things. On the one hand, it really seems like you're keeping it all moving on your own, and you can tell yourself that you've got inspiration raining down on you, but ultimately you can't make anything happen on your own."

"Give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers."

"Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon."

"Here's a difficult concept to grasp and I'm sure I'll go to my grave trying to explain it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn't make it something to emulate. There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don't work as Stories."

"The same way that a photographer is not fully conscious of why she snaps the picture, there is a similar experience for writers. We are attempting to capture something on the page, a fleeting thought, an experience that we can not quite articulate, an idea that we do not quite understand, and by placing these moments in the context of a story, these experiences can be transmitted to our reader as something larger than we are, something beyond our limited understanding."

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

"Today, genre bending and blending is more the rule than the exception."

"They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. [Athletes] call it muscle memory. But for you [the artist], it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory."

"'Don't read other authors while you're writing, or you'll end up sounding just like them.'  IF this were true, everyone would be reading Stephen King while writing their horror novels and we'd have oodles of people making 8 gazillion dollars because they sound a lot like Stephen King."

"When I drew, I lost myself in it and stopped thinking about everything else; it was like creating another world for myself, a world with the things I wanted to see and do.  Thank God I had that."

"When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with people's capacity to fool themselves with stories."

"People don't want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves. There's never been a greater sense of people feeling entitled to your creative work than there is right now.  And in that entitlement, respect for creative work is vanishing."

"I don't write for anyone else, but I'm aware of the fact—once I go to editing and polishing—that I'm asking people to shell out their hard-earned money."

"You should always try your hardest. The Office was the first thing I really tried my hardest at. I don't know why I started this radical new approach then, but I think it was one of those carpe diem type revelations. I came into the industry with a slightly older head on my shoulders than most and maybe deep down knew I shouldn't blow the opportunity. I put everything into it. A lifetime of experiences, and I couldn't have been prouder of the results. I don't even mean the success of the show, but simply the finished product. I was the laziest man in the world before I made The Office but now I'm addicted to that sort of success. Pride in my work. Now I'm a workaholic, because I realize that the hard work is sort of a reward in itself."

"I always thought the ideal would be to write a novel that would be equally appealing to ... a bus driver and an English professor."

"Few aspiring authors want a truly honest critique, especially if that critique advises them to toss their work in progress into the recycle bin and find another creative outlet.  That puts the reader in the unenviable position of trying to find nice things to say even when a manuscript is completely unsalvageable."

"I believe every story leaves some small impact on the reader.  Perhaps it's as small as a turn of phrase you unconsciously file away, a new word you hadn't heard before.  But something, some thread of it sneaks its way into your cranial blueprint and fiddles with the math a bit.  You may look the same, act the same, seem the same, but some microscopic part of your makeup is different."

"With poetry in particular, I just feel like Mother Nature is the best creator of metaphor on the planet." (artist)

"You have to balance doing what you want with make a buck, which is hard.  But if you do what you love and keep that as a goal in your work, you'll find that people will eventually come to you for it.  Instead of you going to them for money, they'll come to you with money and hire you for who you are."

"Your only real responsibility as an artist is to get lost in and follow your obsessions as far as they go, because anything besides that is copying someone else or doing something that's not true to yourself."

"A teacher of mine used to say that a good short story led to a moment of surprise, which he defined as more truth than we think we have a right to expect."

"Ten years ago a friend loaned me Parable of the Sower and it completely changed my life.  It caused me to view art, sci-fi, and literature in completely new ways.  I was very moved by the way Butler was able to seamlessly weave in heavy subject matters as race, gender, and class without ever compromising the integrity of the sci-fi."

"There are poems you write that are so on the edge they could go either way, especially when you take a very big risk."

[The student writer] only vaguely knows that successful writers have overcome the difficulties which seem almost insuperable to him; he believes that accepted authors have some magic, or at the very lowest, some trade secret, which, if he is alert and attentive, he may surprise.  He suspects, further, that the teacher who offers his services knows that magic, and may drop a word about it which will prove an ['Open, Says Me'] to him.  In the hope of hearing it, or surprising it, he will sit doggedly through a series of instructions in story types and plot forming and technical problems which have no relation to his own dilemma.  He will buy or borrow every book with 'fiction' in the title; he will read any symposium by authors in which they tell their methods of work.  In almost every case, he will be disappointed.

"What young writers always talk about—'finding your voice'—well, you can't find your own voice if you aren't listening for it.  The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it's doing.  Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry.  And so we get prose that goes 'clunk, clunk, clunk.'  And we don't know what's wrong with it."

"Real storytelling happens when writers forget the 'rule book' and write to the characters. They get inside the people in the story and experience the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and they let the reactions of the characters drive the incidents of the story."

"The biggest [advantage in self-publishing] for me is the freedom to write what I want when I want. I can jump genres and write several novels a year. Traditional publishing is much too restrictive. I don't want to pump out the same book over and over. I want to challenge myself and produce the work that I feel is missing from the marketplace."

"The performers who fall into obscurity are the ones who don't take risks."

"Call it whatever you like—spirit, soul, psyche, personality, ego, unified field, inner being.  It is somewhere intangible, not physical, from whence these creations come.  Yet, by being put down on paper—letters into words, words into paragraphs, paragraphs into an essay—they join the physical realm."

"That's where drawing came in; creativity kept me from seeing the reality of how terrible things were." (artist)

"Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. ... He didn't entirely enjoy the task.  The title of his article was 'Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.'  Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, 'There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.  Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar?  Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.'  McGrath's frustration here would seem to be about subject matter.  Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?"

"Today's writer is expected to craft an online identity while churning out everything from literary snacks to full-course feasts that threaten to be labeled TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read).  It's an exhausting scenario and, to compensate, many writers resort to templates that allow them to ape what has come before."

"Graphic novels!  These books reach readers no other books can.  They're opening the doors of verbal literacy for visual learners and helping strong verbal readers become visually literate.  I LOVE them."

"The surprise of what you'll find after rendering an image and how different if often comes out is the exact same thing I love about writing poems."

"I don't think that we can minimize the value of what happens when we normalize, through entertainment, other cultures and orientations."

"I'm interested in transformation.  I'll take something that was fragile and delicate and transform it into something that is durable and rigid.  There is always this aspect for me of transcendence—something shifting, something changing."

"Some of my favorite directors of the 1970s became rich and famous and lost touch with other human beings not like themselves.  [With social media,] I can now maintain a connection to other people, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.  It allows me insight into someone who's 15 in Thailand."

"Although technology saves us time, it takes away mental space. Back when we had to do more tasks by hand, these tasks took longer to do, and while we did them, we had more time to think, daydream, or not-think."

"I don't want to release something I don't think is ready. I feel I have one chance to hook readers, so I should show them my best."

"The further you get into a book—the longer you live with a character—the more you realize that nobody's regular, nobody's average.  Everyone's life is incredibly complex."

"Across genres, for one reason or another, various filmmakers—sometimes even those considered the most visual of directors—have drawn on devices dating back 2,500 years to the days of Hellenic theater because there are limitations to showing; showing can't always get us inside a character, or inside a character's story."

"The most powerful weapon in writing is love."

"Plan for the long haul.  If you're extremely talented and lucky, you'll be famous in a few years.  Most of us, including me, are neither that talented nor lucky."

"Every painting I've produced falls short of my expectations.  They are my children, but they're all juvenile delinquents.  I'm not proud of them."

"Memoir is not court stenography.  But neither should it be fiction."

"When an audience is so massive, do people even know why I write or what it means?'

"In learning how to tell a story, and learning how to develop my craft and skill as a storyteller, nothing could have been better practice than investigative journalism. ... From the standpoint of keeping the reader/viewer interested, and being riveting, suspenseful, educational, and entertaining, it's the same thing.  Choosing exactly the right word, choosing exactly the right sound bit or dialogue, making sure the setting is vibrant and that the conclusion is life-changing.  That's exactly the same."

"When I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before."

"Be a cocky little nobody. But work hard, be original and write about what you know."

"Fantasy is the most basic and longest-lived genre.  Shakespeare wrote fantasy.  Gilgamesh was fantasy.  The stories so important that they were passed down from mothers to daughters for millennia without being written down were fantasy.  The advantage of fantasy is that a reader can insert themselves and their own issues into the story."

"I think it's probably good to believe whatever will encourage you to write."

"If you're an artist and you're satisfied, then you're done being an artist.  There's more out there than you could ever imagine."

"The greatest minds of our time and in human history have spent years, and sometimes decades, to condense the best of what they know into a few pages that can be read in a few hours and purchased for a few dollars … but you're not a big reader. That's a bad decision."

"I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast."

"Sitting and writing, even on the awful days, is just a glorious thing to be able to do."

"Encouragement gives writers the confidence to take risks in their work rather than play it safe.  It helps writers go to unexpected places in the work."

"Writing is not brain surgery—no one will die if someone doesn't like your story."

"The only reason I was asked to edit this volume [of The Best American Short Stories] was because someone out there in the world was equally conscientious and didn't let this nobody writer slip between the cracks."

"A review is someone performing thinking, and our finest reviewers are, to my mind, no less remarkable than our finest atheletes."

"We don't own [language].  We walk around pretending like we do.  We give it order and we grab it and control it and pretend that that's meaning, but it's an arbitrary, free-floating sign system, which means any other group of people could grab it differently and order it differently and make a different meaning.  It's like the ocean in that way.  You can't grab the ocean."

"The act of writing a book-length manuscript is its own education, regardless of whether the manuscript is ultimately published."

"The little Brontës, with their kingdom of Gondaland, the infant Alcotts, young Robert Browning, and H.G. Wells all led an intensive dream-life which carried over into their maturity and took another form; and there are hundreds of authors who could tell the same stories of their youth." (artist)

"People think it's a pipe dream to be an artist for a living, and proving them wrong has been the biggest motivation for me."

"The most successful writers complete their words first thing in the morning. Sure, some work late in the evening or when they can find the time. But if you study the habits of professional authors, you'll see that most of them get up early and complete their words before the afternoon.  It's actually not that hard to write thousands of words on a daily basis. The trick is to follow a routine full of habits that reinforce this goal."

"Reading is one of the most profound ways to gain real empathy for people who are different from us."

"In college, I was into sculpture, I enjoyed sculpting the human body and understanding proportions.  You need to have a serious understanding of anatomy to be a fashion designer." (artist)

"I started out writing novels—I wrote two bad ones before I ever touched a short story. ... Those failed novels taught me an immense amount about focus and about paying attention to my audience—essential skills for writing the short story.  Had I not written those bad novels I doubt I would have ever had any luck with short stories."

"Even making small films is an intense thing."

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else."

"Throw away your television. ... Okay, don't throw away your television. You'll miss it when the tornado's on the way. But, at least, like, unsubscribe from premium cable. ... No, seriously, step away from the remote. You'll never know how much free time you actually have until you give up TV. ... Don't even. If you're watching Game of Thrones, you have time to write. ... Okay, so there are some really good shows on HBO, especially The Wire, but you really, really have to be careful. ... Okay, Six Feet Under as well, but, seriously, that's it. And no more than one episode per day. ... Better yet, do throw away your television."

"I was going to do something that I loved—and hopefully I'd be good at it—instead of doing something I was good at but didn't love." (on choosing acting over police science)

"No one could say that [Stephen King's] work is short of storytelling, but he plots very little."

"The [creative] work I'm doing now, and the work I will do, is why I left corporate America.  If I can't remember to embrace the craziness with a smile, then I've made a terrible mistake."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"It has never been more obvious to me that no one but the writer can understand what his story is or what it requires in the telling."

"There's nothing for it but to use one's abilities full blast in every area—and that that resolve and action will conquer all and set [one] free—physically, creatively, and mentally."

"As I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me."

"The Interview Fallacy [is] the fraudulent claim that the artist always knew what he was doing and how he was doing it and can explain the whole business judiciously later when the fires of the work have cooled." (artist)

"There's a huge difference between writing for yourself (aka journaling) and writing for an external human audience.  If your goal is to be published, there's no getting away from caring about—at least a little—what other people want from your writing.  So at some point in your process, you need to attend to the needs of those readers."

"I am so very tired of all this snobbery surrounding how one chooses to publish their work.  It is now possible to make a lucrative career as a self-published author—sometimes, in fact, more lucrative than being a traditionally published author, especially in genre or other niche markets."

"A good book, like a good meal, is consumed with little thought to the hours of care that went into its preparation.  A book takes a month to write and only hours to read.  If you factor in the time it takes to grow, harvest, and prepare the ingredients, every meal takes just as long to prepare."

"I read a book called Quitter by Jon Acuff.  In it, he encourages people not to bail on their full-time jobs as soon as they feel like their dream is gaining some traction.  These were wise words that I needed to hear.  A full-time job provides stability so that you can take more risks on your dream.  In our culture, we're prone to demonize our day jobs and exalt our dream jobs, but we fail to see that the former can be a platform for the latter.  In his book, Acuff explains that the word no is the most valuable word you have as someone working toward your dream."

"AWP conferences are filled with would-be writers, but they're also filled with readers who love reading and want to talk about what they've read and what has mattered to them."

"How does one get lost?  Through incorrect aims, as I have said.  Through wanting literary fame too quickly.  From wanting money too soon.  If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths."

"The reader wants to see the scenery, hear the music, taste the spices, pet the critters, smell the air, and most of all, he wants to feel the emotions.  This is the excitement of science fiction: It gives the reader a chance to be someone else for a while—someone profoundly different; someone in a different universe, facing different challenges."

"It wasn't fantasy, but there was just something... like, I'd paint a still life but the colors wouldn't be quite like you'd expect them to be.  That's the magic of it, and I love it—the world building that occurs on the canvas as it does on the page."

"You can't listen to what people say.  There are always going to be people telling you 'you can't do this,' or 'I don't like this.'  There are so many writers who have gotten 80,000 rejections and then suddenly they sell a book and it's a huge critical and commercial success.  So you never know.  Just keep writing."

"New writers are, if anything, even more welcome in the magazines."

"I see a lot of people who want the things that come along with being a musician or artist, but don't know what they actually want to represent.  When you don't have a vision for what you want to put out there, it can lead to being influenced by those around you.  Everyone is going to have an opinion and give you advice and tell you how to do things.  But if you really want to do your thing and be successful doing something that's unique to you, then you need to have a clear idea of what you want.  You will be influenced by others, but you should have the strongest sense of what you're putting out there."

"Now I'm almost addicted to the risk of failure. ...the adrenalin that comes from creative fear."

"One of my favorite things about illustration is getting to delve into a writer's 'world.'"

"The things you're not supposed to talk about in films are the same things you're not supposed to talk about at dinner parties: religion, politics and sex."

"Have multiple expressions of your awesomeness available at a variety of value tiers. Have something free. Have something out there for a buck or three. Make sure folks can sample your work and still support you should they choose to do so. Be like the drug dealer: first taste is cheap or free, baby."

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

"Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day."

"I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do."

"I now knew the reason why this very talented writer kept getting to the one-yard line and was never able to score a touchdown—a working thriller. Instead of dedicating herself to nailing the form of the thriller/Story, she decided she was above it. She wanted the fruits of the labor (bestsellerdom) more than the labor itself (writing a brilliant and innovative hero at the mercy of the villain scene no matter if the book was ever published or not)."

"I've blocked a lot of self-published authors for this kind of behavior: you're not a sentient spam-bot. Quit with the auto-DMs. Don't sign people up for your bulk emails. Don't use social media to forcibly invite folks to some dubious online event based around your book. Your marketing efforts should be beautiful music that draws me nearer, not a hammer that clubs me where I stand."

"We are seeking to create a story that amuses and entertains while capturing the complexity and truth of the human experience."

"They're the stars: the genre authors whose books sell vastly better than most; so much so that they're no longer labeled genre authors. They're brands."

"This is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us."

"The showbiz of the authorial appearance—the writer as carnival barker—is everywhere.  God help the writer who is unpresentable." (artist)

"That's the case for most content creators. Film makers. Artists. Writers. Musicians. We've made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live."

"What I most love about writing: the weird alchemy of arranging words in the hope that it produces something magical."

"I had to keep arguing for so long that genre is literature just as much as The Grapes of Wrath is.  Of course, most of it isn't as good—but most realism isn't as good as The Grapes of Wrath either."

"We all write for ourselves, because we're all those kids who, when we were little, liked to write poems and short stories.  We amused ourselves."

"For me, having to produce a book a year would be a form of slavery."

"Aspiring writers are everywhere.  That small fact is one of the many things I've learned since announcing my first book deal.  Every distant relative and former coworker seems to know someone who wants to write a book, and they have no problem sending them directly to you."

"You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas?  Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.  Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day."

"I think the creation of beauty is an uplifting act that can help people.  Creating beautiful images that people can see, share, and take solace in is a laudable social goal."

"When you're in art school, you're thrown into all of these vicious critiques.  But the point is to teach you that people's opinions can either have value or you can say, 'Fuck 'em!' and do what you do.  Someone will always think it's a piece of shit, so who cares what they think?  Just do what's important to you, hold yourself to the fire, make sure you're taking it seriously, and do the best you can.  That's enough."

"I once asked a fan who was a homicide cop, 'Why do you even read this? Isn't it a busman's holiday?'  He said, 'Jon, I get the bad guy 70 percent of the time.  You get him 100 percent of the time.'  People like crime novels because they give a certain sense of—I hate to use the words, but—closure and finality.  To some extent that's why people latch onto forensics, and shows like 'CSI' are so popular.  DNA, whiz-bang science."

"Often what brings us to the page is the fact that something is unsettled, something isn't all right.  We write from a need to know; we want to figure out what we think, what we feel, what something means."

"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying.  The more inward you become, the more universal you become."

"The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction.  On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among readers to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read."

"As soon as things get difficult, I walk away.  That's the great secret of creativity.  You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.  If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it.  You've got to say, 'Well, to hell with you.'  And the cat says, 'Wait a minute.  He's not behaving the way most humans do.'  Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: 'Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?'  Well, that's what an idea is.  See?  You just say, 'Well, hell, I don't need depression.  I don't need worry.  I don't need to push.'  The ideas will follow me.  When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them."

"Fake realism is the escapism of our time."

"You need to write. This seems axiomatic because it is. The only way to amass a pile of words into a book is to shovel some every single day. No days off. You have to form this habit; without it you are screwed. I'm going to assume [you] already have this down. If you don't—you won't make it." 

"I had the urge to do things differently, but school convinced me that was a problem.  In creative fields, being different is a good thing.  But until you can say you're a professional artist or performer, you're told that it's wrong to take a different path than everybody else.  You are described as awkward or difficult—so I was an awkward and difficult child."

"I waited until I had an idea for a novel that I completely loved, and then wrote it.  My enthusiasm is what helped me get through the whole process—including finding an agent."

"A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and—voilà!  We are the Creator!  Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!  Nothing could be further from true creativity.  Nothing could be more destructive."

"The first issue in any science fiction story is believability.  Because science fiction is rooted in science—what we actually know about the way the universe works—the writer has a responsibility to stay consistent with that body of knowledge.

"Being a good photographer is about more than talent.  You need to know a lot about business as well."

"The world I see is not the world you see, mine is in me and yours is in you.  Essays are a way to reconcile these individual realities, to have my world meet yourself by taking an external experience or internal perception and reaching toward a universal meaning."

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win."

"How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn't-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise.  My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, 'Well, I know what that will be about.  No thank you.'"  How I love to be proven wrong."

"Avoid 'explaining' too much and just [let] the reader encounter a situation."

"We're basically abolishing the full time musician/writer/filmmaker. We're abolishing the full time creative. That's what's happening.  We're giving money to tech platforms to become 'Unicorns' off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business."

"The Oscars are like a political campaign.  Winning an Oscar is partly to do with how good your film is and partly to do with how tenacious you are during awards season."

"Poets are caretakers of language, and they know language and action are one."

"My success is based on luck. Not on how good I think my own books are."

"There's always a stretch (and sometimes a few) in writing a novel when that intensity kicks in and you feel it taking over everything, even your time away from the desk.  It's a weird trick, your mind craving that imaginary world."

"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment–to put things down without deliberation–without worrying about their style–without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote ... By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught." (artist)

"By the time I started getting hit with 'Show, don't tell' as a screenwriter, I had already had enough experience under my belt to know that, as an overriding cinematic aesthetic, it was more or less bullshit."

"People think you make the gold of your poem out of nothing like Midas or something, but you don't.  You make the gold of your poem out of the seams of ore that you find."

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

"A metaphor is a one-sentence fantasy.  It assigns lifelike or magical qualities to ordinary objects.  Metaphor and fantasy are bedfellows—and many fantasies are intended as metaphors; George Orwell's Animal Farm is the best example of this."

"Stories affect us deeply."

"Self-publishing is not easier, as you will find yourself mucking about in covers and copyediting and distribution and marketing for more hours than you spend writing—and when you publish traditionally you find yourself losing a lot of control over your work timelines and visions for the book's marketing."

"I think you can tell as a reader when a character starts making a statement and you can suddenly hear the author talking."

"A mysterious force has been guiding us, and when we trust this, we connect to the aliveness of our story."

"They pay me absurd amounts of money for something that I would do for free."

"Thrilling as it may be to read about something extraordinary and entirely foreign to our own experience, it's also wonderful to encounter ourselves on the page, to feel the rush of 'that's me, exactly!'"

"Writing crime fiction and doing investigative journalism can be quite similar ... because in essence, both are about telling a great story.  A fabulous, riveting, compelling story, with characters you care about and problems that need to be solved.  You're tracking down clues, following leads, and convincing people to talk.  (Whether they are imaginary or real.)  You want the good guys to win, and the bad guys to get what's coming to them.  And in the end, you want to change the world.  And—incredibly important—you want to be enlightening as well as entertaining."

"Readers look for the surprises in your story the same way a child looks for the prize inside a box of Cracker Jacks.  If you don't surprise your audience, they walk away from your story wondering why they bothered."

"A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you feel like a character is taking over at certain points.  I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things.  You've created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own."

"I made a decision that forever changed my life. Instead of finding time to write, I made the commitment to get up in the morning and complete my words before doing anything else."

"Think about books as both mirrors and doors, and allow all kids to access both.  Celebrate stories of all kinds."