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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Everything changes when we read."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"The most powerful weapon in writing is love."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Stories affect us deeply."

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

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

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

"We readers know the power of fiction." (artist)

"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."

"Convincing science, technology, engineering kids that art is important is a battle that I like to fight."

"When you're two to ninety-two, you want to be told a story."

"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."

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

"Nowadays, it pays to write a lot."

"Technique without imagination is worthless, and imagination without technique will cloud our work's intended meaning."

"I find the culture silences—places people don't want to talk—and I build in them, I work in them. ... Because that's what an artist does. ... An artist points their finger in directions that not everyone wants to look."

"I started working as a production assistant on independent features and that taught me what I didn't want to do.  I was turned off by certain things in production, in particular the attitudes that I saw on so many crews.  I read an interview with Jim Jarmusch and he talked about production being there to serve the film and not the other way around; that really resonated with me."

"I knew how powerfully good theatre could affect people.  I dragged unwilling friends along, and saw their reaction to good work and to rubbish.  I looked at the different audiences, and wondered about how they might change, how more people—people like my parents—could at least be offered the choice of becoming theatre-goers."

"Focus on the Writer and not the Work dishonors both."

"When I write a piece of fiction ... I can make myself feel connected to the larger human family by giving other people pieces of my own reality, thereby getting outside of my own limited view."

"If the magazine (print or electronic) charges money for folks to read the magazine, then that magazine better be paying you."

"Writing is survival.  Any art, any good work, of course, is that."

"We want to feel that life is important.  A good story reminds us of that."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us?  First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that is a gift and a privilege, not a right.  We must earn life once it has been awarded us.  Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation."

"People listen to music and interpret it in their own way, but it's weird when a thing that has helped you through a hard time becomes your career."

"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."

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

"That's what I want to do, as a writer—I want to enter into those minds and hearts, and I want you, the reader, to enter in as well.  Empathy is the portal."

You wouldn't want to immediately start performing in Carnegie Hall before you've practiced your violin for 10 or 20 years.  Writing is no different.  It's hard—show me that you have respect for that."

"At the end of the day, we're probably not changing the world with most of the images we're making.  Instead, I think the main opportunity to contribute to the greater good is through the relational aspect of what we do as artists.  We meet and interact with people form all over the world, all the time.  The ability to go beyond the creation of images and to develop a camaraderie with people ... is important.  Those relationships will likely last longer than the typical lifespan of an image."

"I had firm convictions of the importance of popular art, and of its power to make life seem richer and better.  I knew in my bones that drama need not be elitist."

"Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, 'A mere anecdote' just as anyone can say 'Incoherent!' of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation."

"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."

"Say it with conviction and honesty.  The danger is apologising for it being powerful; you have to let it be powerful.  Don't be spineless and do a joke.  Have the guts to see it through."

"[Others'] objections should simply show you why [y]our work is so important."

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

"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. "

"I'm trying to find truths that are underrepresented on screen, to embrace nuance and ambiguity."

"Piracy, good or bad, is not theft. It is perhaps a kind of parasitism? Combat it where you can, find value in it where you can't."

The Great Discontent

"I wrote because I knew things were changing, and I knew it was my responsibility to record this change."

"I am a deep believer in the act of writing as a powerful tool for many things. It has always been my way of processing events, of processing the world that I see. "

"Technologies come and go. The story remains constant. More to the point, our need for stories remain constant. Storytellers and writers aren't going anywhere. They may need to bend with the wind. They may need to find new ways to thrive. But they—we—will always have a place. The audience will be there."

Zen in the Art of Writing

"Creativity is what makes this whole human race not just function, but evolve."

"Storytelling is how we—not just writers, everyone—practice our humanity, by trying to make sense of the world and our place in it."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

Neil Gaiman - "Exploring Models of Online Storytelling"

"[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."

"I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile too."

"Stories are the most important thing we humans can create."

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

"Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that 'each minute is valuable'—but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it."

"Deny anybody who wants you to work for free. If you work for free, that's something you do, not something someone asks of you—doubly true where they're making money and you're not."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

"When we make the story more important than the result, the story has a chance to live. "

The View from the Cheap Seats

"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"

"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."

"Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." (in answer to being asked to define jazz)

"Share your Must, and in so doing, lift the lives of others. ... When you choose Must, you inspire others to choose it, too."

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

"Picasso had incredible talent, but the secret to his genius was this—Picasso’s life blended seamlessly with his work."

"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."

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

"Don't talk to me in market speak.  Tell me about your characters and the crisis they are trapped in, and make it seem serious, big."

"The most humbling thing for me is when a reader thanks me beause my stories have actually helped them make sense of events or emotions in their own lives."

"I don't think an author should try specifically to write a series (or a stand-alone) due to any idea of the market.  A concept either cries out to be written over the course of several books with a story arc big enough to support it—some threads that tie up satisfyingly in each book with others that demand more time and effort to resolve—or it doesn't.  Writing two books where one is called for or three where a duology would do only means there's a sagging middle somewhere."

"Most reputable media outlets will at least pay something, and most reputable editors are going to pay more attention to clips from serious sources when considering you for assignments."

"My position?  Professional writers, or those aspiring to become professional writers, should not write for free."

"One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work—whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat."

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

"Act like a pro and charge money for your words or build your audience on social media where the only one profiting from your awesomeness is you, not some super-wealthy media mogul that's too cheap to pay writers."

"It is our job as writers to do the work, have the courage to bring it out and present it to the world, because that's why we are here."

"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."

"You don't need to line someone else's pockets to show off your writing skills.  It's easy enough to set up your own blog and display your talents there or to write carefully crafted pitches that make editors want to assign you stories even if you are a newbie.  (That's how I got my start.)"

"The more we write for free or insultingly low pay-rates, the less valuable we all become and the more our industry suffers."

"If you write ordinary stuff for long enough, then that's going to become your default mode."

"The world will always need storytellers. That won't change. What will continue to change is how storytellers are discovered by readers."

"Go to the border of California, throw your book over the fence and be sure they throw the money back at you.  Then get the hell out of there."

"Being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at." (artist)

"None of these excuses are valid.  None. Zip.  Zilch. Zero.  They don't pass the plumber test: Would a plumber say this and not be laughed out of the room?  You're a professional.  Professionals do not work for free.  Period."

"I think the word is fearless because once writers start editing how they do what they do or what they're writing about, I think you've already lost what you need to be doing. So I think being a writer is emotionally brave, and if you can't go there, maybe you're not ready to do it yet."

"That's the purpose of stories, that's what they're for: They make life worth living and, sometimes, they keep us alive."

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

"If you made the bestseller list, who cares?  That doesn't make you a better person.  It means nothing.  It means people buy your books.  The question is, what do you do beyond your God-given gift?"

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

"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."

"What felt magic can becomes either undone or overdone when you try to make a story out of it. Especially when you're a story-maker. Neil is. I am. We both are. I watch the story unfold. Sometimes I dictate the story to myself, then sometimes to the world. Sometimes I take dictation. Sometimes I get it wrong."

"People like big stories.  You get unmatched bang for the buck writing stories.  The bang in this case is being able to plant a big universe and a lot of powerful images inside a reader's head.  The buck in this case is that there's one person working alone without needing any special tools.  That's not going to change.  They may be delivered in different ways, on e-readers or whatever, but they will be around for a long time."

"A story finds its own proper way of announcing itself."

"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."

"We become the stories we listen to, read, and tell. That is the power of a story."

"Write.  And read.  Read and write daily and listen to your gut.  Trust yourself and take yourself seriously.  Close out distractions.  Choose your own influences."

"This is the other unofficial job description of the poet: to sanctify the era's unique thoughts and experience."

"Every minute that you spend writing for free is time that you can't devote to making a living."

"People die of exposure.  As prestigious as you may think writing for certain websites may be, most editors know exactly what websites are legit and pay their writers.  They know you likely gave it away for free—which is definitely not how the pros conduct themselves."

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

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

"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?"

"On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive.  On the best day, the act is transcendent.  The work is purifying and perfect even when it's not."

"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."

"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy."

"I've always maintained that no publisher should make more money off of a book than the writer does.  They publish thousands of books a year—but this is the only one (or two) I'm going to do.  This also applies to the Amazons of the world.  We the writers should be king of the hill because we provide the content."

"A culture is as rich and capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists."

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

"You need to be your best advocate.  You need to understand the financial side of the business, because if you don't, then you by default are going to be taken advantage of by people who do pay attention to those details."

"I think a story, when properly told, finds its own natural length.  If you try to extend it too much, it just stretches and begins to bore, and if you try to compress it too much, it just fractures.  So you just hope that you can find the right rhythm.  It's a musical thing.  You feel it out, you cut back, you switch things around—until it feels entirely natural.  A story should feel easy when of course it's far from easy." (artist)

"The reason we tell stories, to judge from what I have seen among traditional people, is to keep each other from being afraid.  We tell stories and write poems, historically, to keep awe and aspiration and comprehension and the other components of hopeful lives bright in each other's hearts.  Storytelling is how we're moved to take care of each other when we recognize how extremely thin the veneer of civilization we cherish is, and how very hard it is to keep that veneer from shredding in the wind."

"If you do care about having a go at this writing thing as a proper career, do not write for exposure. Exposure cannot be measured, and you might as well write for any number of invisible things: the dreams of sleeping kittens, perhaps, or mystical unicorn turds. You should always be getting something measurable for your writing."

"When I did comic books for the first time, people told me, 'You're going to wreck your career.  You're a novelist, why are you lowering yourself?'  And I thought, What are you talking about?  There's no pyramid with literary fiction at the top and everything else at the bottom.  It's a flat line.  It's just a matter of how you want to tell your story.  And I just like being able to walk across that line." (artist)

"Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience." (artist)

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

"I feel strongly that we're only hurting ourselves as writers by being so secretive about money. There's no other job in the world where you get your master's degree in that field and you're like, well, you might make zero or you might make $5 million! We don't have any standards in that way, and we probably never will. There will always be such a wide range of what writers are paid, but at least we could give each other information."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

"We should all feel as if we're in over our heads when we write; that's how we know we're writing about something that really matters." (artist)

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

"Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living—though you might not think so to look at most human beings—is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing."

"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?"