"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)

"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." 

"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.'"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

The 90-Day Novel

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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. "

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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'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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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)

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I've found everything I've written to be very therapeutic and to have helped me find answers to questions I didn't know to ask myself."

"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."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

"So after you build it, you have to move into it.  You have to look around, listen, taste, touch, smell, and feel what you have created—then report back, so the reader can feel it too."

"Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that’s what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art." (artist)

"The act of writing, once I actually sit down, is always spontaneous and creative ... what Freud would call a primary process—an unconscious mind type of thing, where you're in a hypnoidal state, an altered state of consciousness.  You'll sit down and after three hours it seems like it's been 20 minutes.  Although I find myself as tired as if I've been working for eight hours." (artist)

"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."

"The true failure of a writer is to quit, to give in.  A genuine writer accepts failure, understands how essential it is to the process, and simply continues to write, each time hoping the next story will be better than the one that came before it."

"I exhort poets to become like Felix the Cat, the cartoon character I grew up watching, who has a magic bag of tricks from which he can pull countless, miraculous items or which he can transform in an instant into whatever his mind conjures up."

I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.

"Questioning is key to essay writing—it's usually what gets the piece moving."

"I write things down as I go along and keep it in a notebook and I know when I have enough words gathered for a poem.  It is like harvesting."

"If you can still tell what's red ink on your manuscript and what's your own blood then you haven't finished editing."

"A block may be a dam behind which creativity wells up, under tremendous pressure.  When it dissipates, the writer may experience a surge of creativity, or productivity, or both."

"Even if you go to school and work a lot of internships, you can only really make your way through experience and the process of trial and error.  You have to come up with your own method of doing things if you want to do something truly unique."

"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."

"You have to be willing to go to the place [in your mind] you don't want to go from time to time."

"Writing is hard. You have to sit for hours and type letters. You have to think of things that nobody ever thought of and tell them in ways that nobody ever told them before."

"With creative people ... there are always intrusions, hints or clues from ways of thinking that certainly appear foreign, and creative people use those hints and clues to construct an art, a musical composition or whatever. They sense a surge of power beneath."

"It took me 20 years of writing before I could write [Pulitzer Prize-winning] The Sympathizer.  I got to that point by writing a lot, reading a lot, and enduring a lot."

"The writer's life is filled with endless unknowns and terminable dreads, but when we acknowledge that the thrill of creation is its own reward, we are the lucky ones."

"[Flannery O'Connor] just had a sense of an opening and then pursued it—like Theseus following the thread out of the labyrinth. ... I think this seems scary, but it can lead to an outcome that feels very natural, unforced and satisfying. ... I really encourage people to follow this advice, and largely follow it myself. "

"The creation of a book is such a private and solitary process, and in so many ways is simply irretrievable—a writer can so very rarely specify exactly what was going on for him or her when s/he was writing a particular passage or scene. This is part of why the fun of writing and reading never goes away, because you can just never get to the bottom of it."

"In reaching for the unknown—in that middle realm, somewhere between what I understand and what I have never before imagined—I feel the spark of inspiration begin to glow."

"One of the ways of understanding your unconscious is by realizing that in order to get into it you have to actually stop that garbagey analytical reflex voice in your head and induce a kind of trance state."

"The dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel."

"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."

"Time-based work doesn't make as much sense as it once did, as ideas are not 'things' and can't be measured in units. An idea, conceived in just a moment, can have enormous implications. Thus an 'idea person' has a more flexible approach to time. She learns how to develop the special, and often quite eccentric, circumstances that encourage creativity, and to trust inspiration when it appears—no matter what the time. "

 This Year You Write Your Novel

"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."

"Once you are engaged in writing a piece of fiction from your unconscious, it is crucial that you write every day, because the nature of this place where you go is such that it's very difficult to find your way in. It's pure torture. But even though it's terrible getting in, once you’re in, if you keep going back every day, though it's still always daunting and difficult and scary, it's not nearly so much so."

"You need a physical space—private, safe, and just for you. When you are in this space, you are not available. I repeat, you are not available. This is your sacred space to be by and with yourself. We all need safe containers."

"If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you'll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day."

"When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom."

Worlds of Wonder

"Screenwriters and novelists see the world in very different ways, and have very different observing devices for interpreting their fictional worlds.  Shifting from a screenwriting sensibility to a prose sensibility is the hardest hurdle you will face and also the most difficult one to wrap your head around."

Zen in the Art of Writing

"As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we've done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore."

"There is enormous value to imagining the world of our story prior to writing it or even outlining it."

"[It] is also a symbolic act, a ritual of preparation, in which you reinforce the importance of what you're about to do and remind yourself that you take it seriously. A ritual involves clearing a space for something powerful to happen, and in making this space, you improve your chances of success."

"The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. ... There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind."

"Sometimes inspiration strikes and we sit down to write. But a writer knows the reverse is more common. We start to write and the ideas come."

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

"When you're stuck, when you need a jolt, when you crave to see things from a new perspective, it's time to play." (artist)

"You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your unconsciousness—moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within your psyche. When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"The writing game has a tinge of outlaw culture, which makes writers look where others don't.  It's called 'contrarian thinking.'" (artist)

"First rule of writing a play (or acting, lighting design, directing): Make a choice. You can always change it later."

"You have to let go of that comforting, distancing voice, you have to then descend into that deep dream space of yours, and that will result in a kind of superconcentration. Psychologists call it the 'flow state,' being in the flow. Athletes call it being 'in the zone.'"

"If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, we're going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from."

"The artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won't let them think."

"The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection."

"You must always keep changing your process!  Because there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't."

"For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?" (artist)

"Don't read about the period that you're researching, read in the period … magazines, memoirs, letters that were written in that period, and take no notes. Because when you come to write the thing, if you've taken notes you think you have to use them, whereas if you've immersed yourself in the period, what you need will come to you." (paraphrased)

"Plungers organize by drafting."

"It is our job to ruin the perfection of the empty page. It is our job to disrupt the status quo: because that's what storytelling is. Taking a straight line and bending it, breaking it, shaping it into something far stranger and far greater. "

"When you follow Must every day, you impact not only what you create for your work, but also who you become in your life. This is how your work and your life become one and the same. When you choose Must, what you create is yourself. It is a body of work. As you change, so too does the work. As you grow, so too does the creation."

"Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking." (artist)

"Think larger and smaller at the same time.  Enlarge the context to find the bigger subject in a wider perspective or a longer time frame.  Narrow the context by finding individuals who exemplify something large."

Saving Mr. Banks

"I type in one place, but I write all over the house."

"There are no mistakes in art.  There are accidents—and accidents can lead to something new."

"I usually don't have a preconceived notion of what I'm going to create.  Most of the time I sketch with no goal or objective.  My hand will draw something and then it reveals itself to me."

"I don't know quite how the story will unfold.  I never write to a plan—but somehow, I know that I've 'seen' the entire book flash across my mind's eye like a speeded-up movie.  My process is to slow it all down, to start at Chapter 1 and write down what I see, scene by scene."

"What gives a story high impact is that which is most personal and passionate in its author.  That includes your own fears.  They are your compass.  They're directing you toward what unsettles.  And also to what matters."

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"I'm also a writer who really likes to think before I write.  So many writers, especially new writers, are so quick to the page, and I feel like there's great value in letting the idea turn over a lot."

"I don't think there's any rule.  I don't write sometimes for months.  Of course, I write emails every day, I write in my diary every day.  I may not touch the manuscript at all, or anything pertaining to it. ... Whether [or not] I hit the keyboard, I'm writing in my head.  I'm working on my books all the time.  I write best in short, intense periods.  A period, say, of three or four months—very intense work.  And then I draw back and I read, and I do other things.  Again, I don't think there's any rule to any of this.  It's the greatest profession because you do it all in your own way."

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

"In the actual act of writing, you have to leave enough openness, enough mental openness, for things to go in often bizarre ways, to allow these oblique-angle things to emerge."

"Listen to the story being told.  Come up with the idea, but let it play out naturally.  Try not to shape it word for word or be so married to an outline that you deny what could become something amazing."

"The relationship we have with our work is one of the most intimate.  Writing is a reflection of the soul.  But sometimes, the soul is a reflection of the writing process."

"Whether it's the meaning of life or why the guy killed the old pawnbroker, we're always looking for answers." (artist)

"To allow yourself that space is, I think, the nub of creativity.  It's also scary and risky, because you're building a house with no real blueprint, driving without a map, never quite sure where the hell you're going."

"Let the poem teach me about poetry and what language can do, rather than being the captain of the ship."

"For me to write, I can't be thinking about who's going to read this.  It would be inhibiting."

"Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life."

"Work on one thing at a time until finished."

"I say this with great honesty: I always approach a book by writing about the thing that keeps me up at night.  What is really waking me up or keeping me from falling asleep?  What am I grappling with?  And then I think, I cannot be the only one on this planet thinking about this right now.  I can't be the only one worried about this.  I start with whatever that experience is, and I just keep peeling it until it's more of the raw experience, and that's where I think fiction steps in."

"There is no way to write.  There's only the way you find to write."

"I want to be able to express all the currents that flow inside me.  To have that agility to reach a state of otherness and yet express my own internal truth at the same time."

"I found myself blessing the secret mind... observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.  We never sit anything out.  We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.  The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"All writers feel the atmosphere surrounding him... Those kinds of stories soak into him. It doesn't have to be direct."

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

"The act of making something from nothing will be the hardest thing you'll ever do."

"It's important to recognize and to respect what it is to create something out of nothing—the challenge of it, the difficulties of it."

"Read everything but write on your own.  And if you have a mentor, learn what you can then run like hell."

"The discipline of the writer is to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."

"The main thing for writers and for those who are innovative in different ways is to acknowledge you have a creative process.  Take a moment to lift your head and look at that environment.  The more you can work with it rather than against it, the better."

"Each novel teaches me how to write it, and before I can truly understand what I'm writing, I need to imagine the one person to whom I'm whispering the story urgently."

"Writing, for me, works best as a daily practice, at least when I'm on a project.  When I'm on a project, it's good to be immersed in it, to return to it, daily."

"I try to write the first draft very quickly.  I don't write the end.  I don't write the last quarter.  So I write my draft.  And then ... my next draft is usually cleaning it up and seeing what's there: 'What do we have here?'"

"Editorial decisions are subjective.  ....  Writing is an ongoing process and should never end with a rejection letter."

"To write historical fiction of any kind—short stories or not—you need to be able to close your eyes and have the past blaze up around you."

"It's this funny headspace you get in, where you're acting, really.  ....  You literally pretend you are this person, and you go about your life as if you are this person.  And so, when people will ask me, 'Did you like this character?' I don't know.  Because I'm so far inside them, I can't judge them at all.  You're behaving as if you are this person."

"I like to keep parts of the writing process a secret even from myself.  Otherwise, I get bored."

"Find clarity in what you do.  Remove noise and zero in on pure signal. All that matters is what you do.  Put differently: don't care so much."

"I start with almost nothing: A question I want asked, or a feeling, a sort of weird conflicted feeling that I have and I want to explore.  So I think all my books start that way.  And then, as it always does, the book takes on a life of its own."

"I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.  I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.  And out of that love, remake a world."

"No amount of knowledge or tenacity or craftsmanship can substitute for the alchemy of working on the right project at the right time."

"We often have to write three hundred pages before our soul discloses to us what it is that was waiting to be discovered."

"When you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place ... whatever scared the hell out of you down there—and there's plenty—you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily."

"Each writer is on a journey to discover his or her own process."

"The specific challenge is to get it done.  And to get it done as powerfully and as beautifully as you can.  And to split the atom every time you write a sentence.  That's all.  No big deal.  Just split the atom once.  And then do it again and again.  And then find a good title.  And hope that someone gets blown away." (artist)

"You have to tell your mind to back the hell off. It's another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art."

"[The airplane pilot] said, 'Why do you think I do this job?  It's for the seven minutes of takeoff and the 11 minutes of landing.  The computer does the rest.'  And to me, that's like writing.  You do it because you get this great idea, and you have the excitement of the first draft, but most of it is revision, and doing the wrong stuff, and fixing and fixing.  And then, you get the landing.  It's very much the same."

"As a writer, it's like you're a fighter in the ring.  You have to bob and weave and juke and move and change direction and tactics all the time based on what your instincts are telling you about what's happening on the page."

"There are plenty of places that are built on the business model of exploiting writers by not paying them.  Are you going to let them do that to you?"

"Writing is an exercise in sculpture, chipping away at the rock until you find the nose."

"I never really know what something will become when I begin. But once I am inside it, I am completely there."

"Curiosity creates a sort of brain vortex that sucks in whatever you feel most motivated to learn, along with ideas that may be floating around your environment.  The spark of curiosity lights up the hippocampus (where the creation of memories occurs), and the reward and pleasure brain circuits, which release dopamine.  So if you want an alert brain, start your day by immersing yourself in something you find fascinating and mysterious.  Pique your curiosity, enjoy the natural high and learn something new."

"Breaks give your mind a chance to refresh.  I write multiple books at once, and I'm always thinking about them, even if I'm not at a computer.  It's a habit I picked up as a litigator: You have 1,000 facts in your head, and the most important thing isn't that you know them all- it's that you crystallize them, so that you can present them clearly.  Epiphanies don't occur like a spark; they're actually ideas that have been floating around in your brain for a while.  By the time I sit down to write, my thoughts are well organized and come out cleanly."

"Know what you're trying to make; know it; practice it.  Just write, and write seriously, and don't worry about genre too much.  Create something brand new."

"Art takes time.  Stories have their own heartbeat, and they will unfold at their own pace.  All you have to do is to continue to show up and do the work.  Every day."

"I write pieces, and move them around. And the fun of it is watching the truthful parts slide together. What is false won't fit."

"I'm a big believer in form following content.  You try to find some essential truth and then figure out the best way of getting there."

"I know nothing at all.  Nothing.  The first line comes and I start.  I always thought that I began with something talking to me, but I realized it's not true.  I begin by seeing something and then it's translated into a voice talking to me and then I follow it and see where it will go."

"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."

"The impulse to write is an impulse to order events.  You write from the events of real life, which means you write from chaos.  But when you write a story, you can take a character from here and something that's happening from there... and put it all together.  You can order it in a way that you can't order what happens in your life.  Just for that minute it's very rewarding."

"Think of how a movie starts out.  It's a baby.  It's like the fetus of a movie star; we all start out ugly.  Every one of Pixar's stories starts out that way.  A new thing is hard to define; it's not attractive, and it requires protection. ... Every new idea in any field needs protection.  Pixar is set up to protect our director's ugly baby.  Of course you can't protect the baby forever.  At some point, it has to grow up and change into something, because the beast is still there.  That's a positive thing.  Because sometimes the ugly baby would rather play in the sandbox forever.  It's a lot like raising a kid.  It's complex and interesting.  But most people want to make it simpler than it is."

"I've adjusted my thinking to imagine myself as an artist. I don't know why that made such a huge difference, but it did. An artist in a studio, working. Not the author of the book in the store, but the person in her house, pursuing a thought or character or image and trying to wring something meaningful from it."

(written by Robert Olen Butler)

"That pure freedom you only have when you write your first book.  No one was waiting for it.  No one expected it; nobody knew I was doing it.  Nobody cared.  There was total indifference, which I think is so beautiful and healthy for the creative process, to feel that nobody is listening and waiting and expecting."