The Pout-Pout Fish

"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."

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

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

"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."

Great British Cooking: A Well-Kept Secret

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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." 

"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 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."

"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."

I Am Pilgrim

Turn of Mind

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

The 90-Day Novel

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

"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."

"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."

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

Happy

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—'I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand'—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher."

"Things took a more dramatic turn for me when I stumbled across The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. ... I didn't know Bester was a legend in the field.  Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction, but at the time I didn't know who he was, either.  I just decided to try it ... and it just blew my mind.  I think of The Stars My Destination as my origin story: reading that book made me want to find more books that could blow my mind like that."

"The novel about character (in which character is primary) is never going to die.  I still read a lot of books because I'm interested in the characters.  I think everybody does to some degree or another."

"Every book is a billboard for your entire backlist. If that book is enjoyed, it will lead a certain number of readers to your other books."

"I tried Jurassic Park, and Michael Crichton is ultimately the author who really got me into science fiction.  He's actually kind of anti-science fiction in a way, because science is always the antagonist in his novels, but all of the science in Jurassic Park gave me the confidence to go try some 'real' SF."

"Our job in publishing is to keep creating many different kinds of books and then getting out of the way so that readers can pick their own."

"I decided that I wanted to have a record for my sons that would say, 'Wow, Mom really marveled at the world.  She really championed the good on Earth.'  That's how Lucky Fish partially came to be.  And I've never really written for a specific audience in mind until that particular book."

"Mamet and Macy's method to deconstruct the fundamental unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter's Storytelling is a Godsend. Read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New York. It's so simple, direct and easy to understand, it's mind blowing."

"The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel."

"The ongoing professionalization of writing, an outcome of our neoliberal moment, has acted centrifugally on writers, clotting them together in ways that are unprecedented.  I tend to spend more time with readers.  What truly enriches my creative life are folks who do anything other than writing. ... And books, of course.  I don't need much else to inspire me as long as I have books."

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands."

"I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this."

"I felt almost dishonorable accepting people's thanks. I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library; fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it."  (artist)

 This Year You Write Your Novel

Worlds of Wonder

"Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of [the authors] in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night. Read the books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire's golden light."

Zen in the Art of Writing

Neil Gaiman - "Exploring Models of Online Storytelling"

"Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real."

"A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."

The View from the Cheap Seats

The Crossroads of Should and Must

Fictional Landscapes Become Physical

"What matters to me is that they have the books and they love them. ... And they'll tell people about them."

Edge of Tomorrow

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."

"I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me."

"The books a writer reads are so important; they form a compost bed beneath the rosebushes of her own writing."

"I don't like labels.  I don't like it when bookstores have sections labeled 'Women's Fiction' because they don't have sections labeled 'Men's Fiction.'"

"As long as I'm in that 'zone,' I'm happy enough whether I've written 700 words or, like one crazy day writing The Turning Point, 7,000."

"Today, thanks to certain pioneering authors, some great books, and some great movies and TV series, the wall between genre and mainstream fiction has become not a wall, but a river.  It can be forded or bridged."

"Every single novel owes a debt to books that came before it."

"The most important thing that I think fiction does [is that] it lets us look out through other eyes... but it also gives us empathy.  The act of looking out through other eyes tells us something huge and important, which is that other people exist. ... One of the things that fiction can give us is just the realization that behind every pair of eyes, there's somebody like us."

"Do not be constrained by the formats that exist. Story does not begin and end with a physical book." (artist)

"The world should be filled with books that some people are offended by and some people aren't."

"You can find everything that exists in the world in books—sometimes in truer colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist."

"I think books should be cheaper.  I want books to be accessible.  If books are precious (and as a result, expensive), then publishers win, readers lose, and by proxy, writers lose, too."

"In a good novel, the first five words make you forget you're reading."

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"You like what you like. Nobody can tell you to like something that you don't, or not to like something you do—or if they do, it's not going to change anything in your head, no more than they can be made to like or dislike garlic or lobster or chocolate or olives or natto by you telling them to change their minds.  I don't expect everyone to love everything I write. I don't think that if you like something I write you'll like the next thing, any more than I love everything that the people whose work I enjoy do.  There are Dickens novels I think as good as anything anyone’s ever done, and Dickens books I will be very happy never to read again or think of again. I'm happy to know that my judgment is subjective, but then, that's the whole point of having a point of view.  I published American Gods after Stardust, and most of the people who loved Stardust did not love American Gods, and the people who loved American Gods and picked up Stardust next were often very disappointed indeed. And I am proud of both of them, as I am of all my art-children..."

"The most powerful books are the ones who force the reader to use the imagination."

"We need books that are both mirror and lamp, books that mirror the breadth of our enormously rich and diverse experiences and cultural heritage, books that excite our aesthetic sensibilities, that stimulate us to think, that cause us to see ourselves in the Other."

"For me, that is the question any good book asks, what does it feel like to be alive, how do we struggle, what is essential, what is felt?"

"If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em."

The Sparrow

Boy

The Alchemist

Black Books

Why Work?

The Wolves in the Walls

Japan

Die Empty

Ten Zen Seconds

(written by David Farland)

Off Balance

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Spring Snow

Magician

One-Moment Meditation

(written by Robert Olen Butler)

A Happy Pocket Full of Money

The Ocean at the End of the Lane