...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...

Buku yang kau tulis adalah semacam jejak yang terus menyala di dunia, dan bisa menjadi cahaya akhiratmu.

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force

I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.