"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)

"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."

"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."

"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. "

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

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

"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 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)

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

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

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

"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)

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Whenever we do something to appease other people, it doesn't come across as genuine.  We want to make sure that we are constantly being ourselves, so we focus on developing our own work, and if mainstream outlets find us, then they have made a true discovery—we are not being pushed on them by a powerful PR firm."

"There are broadly two ways to approach any piece of writing, in my opinion. One is where you have an idea of where the whole thing is heading ... The other is where you have a phrase, an image, maybe a single line that fascinates you and provokes you into elaborating it."

"Expression, rather than repression, is vital."

"Making music and being an artist in any way, really, stems from an essentially self-centered place.  Some people will say that they make music or art to give something to the world, to share it with people, because they think people need to hear it.  I think most of that is bullshit.  You create things because they come from a place that is purely you.  It is very self-centered, which is not a bad thing—it is just the nature of creativity." 

"Whatever type of fiction you intend to write, the greatest challenge you face is to go your own way."

"I do try to startle myself into a small combo of delight, wonder, and a dash of fright as I am composing a poem, just to keep me on my toes."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with writing or creating with an audience in mind.  That's smart as long as you feel like you're part of that audience and you don't change or go against your own intuition an about what you should create in order to make them happy."

"One day, I had a great idea for a mystery.  I knew it was a good idea; I got goosebumps and became obsessed.  I announced to my husband, 'I'm going to write a mystery.'  He was sweetly skeptical, but supportive, and I was naively compelled to write it.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought—I've read a million mysteries!  I'll learn.  I was 55 years old, and that book turned out to be Prime Time, which won the Agatha for Best First Novel."

"I don't think in terms of 'success' so much anymore.  Because I know how things can happen: You can have success, and then it can be taken away from you.  Then you can have it again.  So I just really focus more on the work.  I love to write, and that's what I'm going to keep on doing, no matter if I'm published again (or not published again)."

"Being creatively satisfied means that you possess the faith that as you connect the dots of your inspiration, bridges will form—and yet more dots will appear.  Once you settle into the idea that that can continue forever, then you are satisfied knowing that there will always be something that draws you in, compels you, and drives you to look closer.  There will always be another way to express yourself.  It's a dance that never ends."

"The more personality I put into my work, the more people respond to it.  I've realized that I don't have to only do what I think others expect from me or what I expect to get paid for."

"We're never fully satisfied.  Despite being happy with most of my work, I still constantly struggle with those inner demons who tell me it's all junk.  That said, the older I get, the less time I spend worrying about how others receive my work, or even what others are working on."

"I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation.  I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own.  Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs."

"Think back to our artisans, arranging their days to their personal satisfaction rather than the demands of the system."

"Of all the things I've learned about writing, this is the most important: There's a domain of excitement and eagerness and delight that can be astonishing.  It is a place of commitment and discovery and wonderment.  It is the far side of passion.  It is totality of purpose, an inspired obsession.  I like to call it stardrive.  It's the engine at the center of your personal starship.  It's your heart of brightness.  It is who you really are.  It is simply you—you are the source."

"Once I started taking pictures, I never put the camera down.  That is how I fell in love with photography." (artist)

"It just felt great.  I loved the way [photography] offered the possibility to document life and freeze time.  I also liked that it could be a completely independent art form—sometimes it's just me and my camera."

"Music videos are what made me want to go into filmmaking."

"People who follow trends are not writing for themselves."

"I remember feeling a sense of comfort, joy, and pride when working with my hands: I was in my element.  I was pretty imaginative, but I never considered myself an artist—somehow, I still don't."

"Find what you love. Then fight like hell when people try to take it from you."

"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."

"Yell.  Jump.  Play.  Out-run those sons-of-bitches.  They'll never live the way you live.  Go do it."

"Something magical happened that night.  When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up.  I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character.  There was relating happening."

"I have this saying: 'There's no music playing when your dreams are coming true.'  That is the hustle.  The hustle is humbling and, at best, completely authentic and gracious."

"Your goal, as a storyteller, is to evoke the sense of wonder in your audience.  You start by evoking the sense of wonder in yourself.  Where one person is awestruck, others are also likely to be amazed."

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That's what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. [My wife] came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say 'You're this,' as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write."

"Let's allow ourselves to have fun, to take risks, to make wild choices, and always, to hold it all loosely.  We are after a sense of aliveness and surprise."

"By inquiring into what we feel strongly about, we are led directly to the seed of a powerful story."

The Great Discontent

"Perhaps you keep your drafts folder to yourself, for your eyes only.  You have never submitted.  You're too busy, you say; you'll start another day.  You write for you.  And you secretly fear hearing what an editor has to say.  I urge you: Put yourself out there."

Worlds of Wonder

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

"There are many factors that create a writer and the most significant is need.  I often joke, when talking at literary conferences and events, that if we, the writers, could choose to stop, we would.  For most of us, the need to make sense of and organize life through story, particularly its traumatic moments, was born many years before we penned our first title."

Zen in the Art of Writing

"To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you."

The View from the Cheap Seats

Ray Bradbury - "Telling the Truth"

The minute you try to think about what people want, you're dead.

"Write high-impact fiction ... Do it for you.  Do it for me.  The night is long.  The hours of darkness are dull.  We need more fireworks."

"Just write the stories you want to write.  If you are writing about authentic characters, we (agents, then editors, then readers) will care."

"If you want to find your answer as a writer, follow whatever you're passionate about."

"That's what I want for you! To surprise yourself, not know what you're going to do next, what you're going to write next."

"Whatever you're doing, you should be passionate about.  If you're not, then say 'no'."

"You go for a world that interests you, and then you find something else that makes you go, Oh, that's interesting."

"Even my publisher will say they just want more thrillers.  That's what feeds my family.  But I feel like if I did that, I wouldn't be being true to myself."

"I don't write things to benefit the world.  If it happens that they do, swell."

"I didn't follow my gut.  After that, I said, I'm never doing that again.  And the book after that, when I went back to doing what I wanted to do, wound up being, at that point in time, the bestselling book we ever did."

"Have the courage to go forth and do not what everybody else is doing but what you want to do."

"The X factor on every page is, does the writer love what they're writing about?  Anything you love that you've read in your life, from Page 1, you feel the writer's passion.  That's the thing that you can't put your finger on."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.)"

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

"You're doing what you want to do because you're curious about that idea.  My motivation for writing has always been curiosity.  I prefer to write about things that I know a little about, but not a whole lot about."

"You have to write what is in your heart and your mind and your imagination, and that's the place where it has to come from.  I don't think that looking at what sells is the way to start a novel or a work of nonfiction.  I get about 200 books a week at my house.  I'm always waiting to be surprised or bowled over.  You don't want to be bored."

"I was a real outliner... the real price was, the writing was always boring, because I had already mapped out what I was going to say.  There was no energy left, and no excitement left in the prose itself."

"Staying creative for life means remembering (sometimes on a daily basis) your original why: why you write, why writing matters to you.  It means holding onto what's personal and even private in the pursuit, and holding close what's most meaningful."

"Some books, because [Stephen King] has a critical following, people tear apart—but the next book might be considered an instant classic.  He's not afraid."

"You'll know if the ending works. You'll know because you're happy with it. It's that simple."

"Do what you're best at. Don't make yourself miserable doing what you think you should be doing, do what you enjoy doing.  Utilize your time where it's best spent.  If you have a talent and passion for blogging: Do that.  If you enjoy Twitter and know the ins and outs: Do that.  If you are a great public speaker and love attending writers' conferences: Do that.  There's no one way to promote a book."

"I was discouraged very early in my college years by people who told me I wasn't a real writer because I didn't write every day.  Things like that should not be said.  And anybody who says anything to you like that, you have to ignore them.  You know, there are no rules."

"I always distrust overly specific writing advice.  I don't agree with it, necessarily.  When you're thinking about what to write or how to write something, it's too easy to make a lot of arbitrary rules for yourself.  I think the difficult thing with learning how to write is not learning the style or rules, but figuring out what story you want to tell."

"I want you to envy me my joy. ... Say 'am I being joyful?'" (artist)

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are.  Resistance is futile."

"The writer's goal should be to get published, but the writer's love should be of writing.  Too many writers are in love with the idea of writing-to-be-published and too few are in love with the act of writing."

"Try not to please anyone or any particular audience.  Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well."

"Write the poem you would never show anyone."

"Write the kind of stories that you'd love to read, not what you think will please other people or the market in general.  If you love it, there's a good chance that others will too, and those readers will tell their friends."

"Writers should have the highest ambition; not just for themselves, but for the form they work in."

"When you're finally in it—this is the part I really like—the writing just writes itself, it really does, and you're eager to get back to the work.  It's like reading a good book except you're writing it."

"The same thing that gets readers through reading your book should be the same thing that gets the author... through writing the damn thing.  The reader must have sustained excitement.  And so too must the writer."

"All I can do is write a better book and one that I'm proud of.  I can't meet everyone's expectations, but I can strive to meet my own."

"Let the love of your work be your primary reward."

"Write what interests you, not what you think should interest you.  Because there's so much that we feel like we should do.  And you get into real trouble as a writer when you're writing what you should be writing.  Not what you want to be writing."

"I think Rimbaud said it best when he said if you're telling the truth, you bring back the shape of the thing... but I think what he was talking about was, really, bringing something like emotional honesty to whatever you're writing.  If you do that, then the shape of the piece, of the writing, becomes so much more of a pleasure, because you're really excavating something that's unique to you, which is the emotional truth of the situation."

"Don't censor yourself.  Don't chase trends.  Write whatever is in your heart.  If it's honest, you will find an audience."

"There's no 'correct path' to becoming a real artist. You might think you'll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it's all bullshit, and it's all in your head. You're an artist when you say you are. And you're a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected."

"I will take you, my audience, to a miraculous world, but to do this, you will need to agree to my terms, that the drama will be tied to sentences, that characters will be defined in words, and the wonders will exist in the traditional way, with short stories that muscle across the page."

"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..."

"Life is too short not to take risks and too long to live with an output of weak-kneed, limp-noodled, utterly derivative, safe-as-houses storytelling."

"You have to retain a sense of childlike wonder."

"Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you."

"I've always preferred an auteur approach and not a committee approach. Nothing wrong with it—nothing wrong with a committee—but it doesn't interest me. I like to have the ideas.  Nothing excites me as much as an idea popping in my head.  It's the only thing left that gives me an adrenaline rush. This is my extreme sport."

"I'm going to keep doing it my way until someone says, 'You can't do it anymore,' and I think that's the only way to do it."

"That was actually quite liberating.  ....  I could write the exact story that I wanted to write.  I didn't think about how anybody would receive it."

"The reader is free to stop reading, to close the book, to not buy the book.  That reader's frustrations are entirely valid, and that reader should read something else.  I just put it out there, and it is what it is."

"The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year."

"The biggest for me [by self-publishing] 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."

"It's gotta be with a great sense of fun!  Writing is not a serious business.  It's a joy and a celebration.  You should be having fun at it.  Ignore the authors who say, 'oh, my god, what work.'  No, to hell with that!  ...If it's work, stop it, and do something else."

"If you want to do it, don't question it.  Just do it."

"The universe always rewards courage.  The more you move in the direction of what your gifts are, and what your life road is, the more people and events and experiences will conspire to give you what you need.  Write."

"Write what you want to write.  Write what you need to write.  Write what engages you, what interests you, what gets your blood pumping and your jaw tight.  Because what else are you going to do?  Platy it safe?  Write what everybody else is writing just because everybody else is writing it?  What's the point?  Why bring nothing new to the table?  Why fail to bring yourself and your passions to the page?"

"Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real.  In order for this to happen it is necessary to believe in the story one is working on."

"It's something you have to learn, how to tell the right stories for you, and it's this completely ineffable thing."

"It's just never been a better time to be a writer.  It's a world of opportunity.  You can do whatever you want.  You can do it however you want.  It's magical to [say], 'You know what?  I'm going to write a new adult series'—and then write it.  It's amazing.  I don't have to convince anyone, I don't have to sell anyone on it.  I don't have to run it by an agent or a publisher.  I'll just do it."

"What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' ...It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given.  If we write simply about what we know, we never grow.  We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on.  We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves.  What one should write about is what interests one."

"Don't write because you think the genre is cool, write because you have a story to tell (and the genre will find you)."

"Sometimes the reason to write something is because it's cool.  Because you enjoy it.  Because you're having fun.  Because you just think, 'Hey, why not?'  Those are reasons that sometimes get lost in the more schematic ways we approach writing.  Sometimes if you get excited, guess what?  The reader's going to get excited, too."

"I wrote the kind of book I want to read.  I was as authentically myself as I could be.  That's tougher than some people would think."

"Hopefully there's an intersection between what you're good at, what you enjoy [and] what readers want.  If you can meet all of those things, then you're in that sweet spot, because you're doing what you love, you're doing what you're good at, and you're doing what people want to buy."

"I just write what I like."

"If you don't feel anything for your story, no one else will."

"I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try to brand yourself, [but] to write the kind of books you love to read.  Because first of all, you're doing something you love.  Second, you're working in your comfort zone, and third, even if this particular book doesn't work, it's going to be a lot more pleasant an experience."

"What all writers need to be reminded of from time to time: that this thing we do, this thing we've devoted our lives to, is supposed to be fun."

"I write what I do in order to be able to live as happily as I do.  I have to vent out the disastrous stuff, and I know how to do it.  It's amateur psychology 101: I try to force the stuff I'm afraid of into a shape.  By making it fiction I get to control it."

"Write the book you want to read.  It's the only way you'll write anything that's any good."

"I always had fun writing.  Even when people really close to me were saying, 'Maybe it's time to give up this dream,' it never crossed my mind to stop—because I've just always loved telling stories, I've always loved crafting sentences.  And there was always that immense satisfaction when I would stop that I'd written even one sentence that I really liked.  Or one scene that I felt was really moving.  And I love that experience."

"Write what you are comfortable with, write what you're interested in and what makes you happy.  Because if you are enjoying the writing experience, you're probably going to be more successful with it."

"The No. 1 piece of advice [my mother] gave me was, 'write the book you want to read.'  And if you're not writing the book you want to read, something's wrong."

"I wasted a lot of years writing short stories when I clearly should have been writing novels because that’s what I loved."

"At some point, you have to say 'I'm the writer, it's my job to figure out where I'm going to go with it,' you know?"

"I'm just trying to be honest, as honest as I can.  If I were trying to write with the taste of the multitudes in mind, I'm afraid I'd never be able to finish anything."

"I was told that a book about slavery would not sell, and I'm glad I ignored that."

"It's about a writer [Pultizer Prize winner Gilbert King] who chose to do the work that made him proud rather than trying to please others, and deciding to be a writer rather than a Writer."

"Follow your own rules.  Readers want to believe—we want to suspend our disbelief."