The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business.

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

When I write I am an avocado, and in a team sport setting, I am guacamole. And not to sour cream on your dreams, but with my love life, I am a nacho.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.