Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

Some writers aren't writers, they are mere escapees' and refugees' on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled. (Marti Melville)

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.