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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"I believe that every writer must stand behind his work, and so completely and forever. To allow alterations or perversions of the work is unconscionable."

"Expression, rather than repression, is vital."

"I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that I believe you think."

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

"I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, and of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter."

"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. "

"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're not prioritizing the things you say you care about, consider the possibility that you don't actually care about those things."

Harlan Ellison - "Pay the Writer"

"Most of these people have stopped dreaming. They don't share your vision for an amazing future. Life has ground them down to be 'practical'. To get a day job and do what's expected of them. In short, people who can't see it for themselves can't see it in you."

"The first use for propinquity is removing all the little barriers that will keep you from writing. The more of these exist, the less likely you are to write. Many of them are simple, and some so tiny you may doubt that they'll keep you from writing. But they will."

"Vision needs solitude. Leadership needs solitude. Courage needs solitude. Because when our choices evolve from an internal place of sure-footed, rooted knowing, we become resilient, emboldened, and focused."

"Your body and brain are the Story-Engine. Keep them primed to write."

"I want anyone who has ever had an idea shot down by a supposed authority to take heed.  I have to say, my gasted is totally flabbered that anyone would dissuade a student from pursuing something based on an idea alone."

"I don't show a soul a word I've written—my editor and agent read the third draft, but my friends and family have to wait until it's published."

"Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you."

"You have to give yourself permission, say to yourself, 'I'm not foolish for wanting this.'  All writers have to fight the same fight.  I have to write 2,000 words today, no matter what.  That's my discipline, and that's me protecting the work."

"I'm happiest and most productive when I shut out all the chatter about 'the business' and focus on what I do best: writing."

"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."

"Claim your life, own your existence. Write in spite of whatever conflict you face."

"As an artist, you want as many people to see your work as possible with no compromise.  .... I don't want to .... have it watered down, and follow a soap opera, and have all the edges filed down and have someone interfere.  ....  Delivering the exact thing that I made ... that's so important to me, you know, that's, I said, the ideal of the most beautiful and purest thing. And it's how little it can be ruined from your brain to the observer. And that's the way you do everything yourself, really, because, you know, I've probably only produced and directed to protect my writing, the idea, you know?"

"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."

"Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards."

"As long as I can get exactly what's in my head with minimum compromise, I don't care where it's going. I don't care if, in five years' time, they've discovered telepathy, that I can just have ideas and blink and people get them all around the world. You know, we don't know what the medium's going to be, so I'll have whatever delivers the purest idea that I have to the most people."

"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?"

"The problem is that we view writing as a luxury, something special to allow ourselves as soon as we've taken care of the countless nagging duties that seem to come first.  Once you put writing first, the rest of your life will fall into place."

"Protect your voice and your vision.  Protect it—and if going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don't do it.  It's awfully rough right now.  It's a jungle out there.  Do what gets you to write, and not what blocks you."

"Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there."

"It's like it's all inside me just kind of trying to get out.  If I talk about it, it diffuses it, lets it out, and then maybe it wouldn't be as clear to me, or the characters wouldn't jump out of the page.  The dialogue wouldn't just jump out if I talked about it with people and they said, 'Oh yeah, that part's good, that part's...'  It's better for me to just keep it all bottled up and let the pressure build."

"I know when my brain cells are freshest.  I protect that time.  I know when I'm in a good mood, I'm more generative.  When in a foul mood, I should be editing."

"You've got to go, 'No, I can't come into work on the weekends—[that's] when I work on my novel.' ... People deserve those dreams, and they have to fight for them.  You don't want to be at the end of your life and go, 'I met all the obligations people had for me.'"

"You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death."

"I don't think we should discuss ideas.  I think we should just write, and then go in with the book and say, 'here's the book.'  Now, sometimes you have to say something.  But I wouldn't listen to what they say back—because they're not prophets. ... Agents particularly are really not in the business of being prophetic.  They know what has worked, and that's it."

"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."

"You've got to protect your voice and your vision from everybody, really.  Even the best-intentioned editors.  And I mean, I love my editor; I've been with Vicky Wilson for over 35 years.  She's wonderful, and her remarks on the finished manuscript are always terrific.  But I don't go to her to discuss a germinating idea."