True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

it's good for you to write down your thoughts. It'stherapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think aboutlife.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

Hemingway suggested you write the truest sentence you know. I say write the falsest one you don’t know. This is fiction.

My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

You can read until you’re blue in the face, but I’d recommend writing until you’re red in the face. And ass.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.