If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.

A book called Life of Silence would get everyone talking. I should write it, using invisible ink. Or to really make it see-through, I should hire a ghostwriter.

Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life; the one thing I could do until the day I die and still feel like I haven’t done enough.

I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.

A picture with one word on it is like a thousand-and-one-word piece of literature. At this rate, I should be done with my million-word novel in about 999 minutes.

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.

I never said you were supposed to be a jailer, i only said a normal person would have questioned why someone would create a decoy nun and then crawl out the window.

I'm going to be a person who writes stories.I never told mom and dad how much I loved them.I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.

I don't know whether it is beautiful or sad, that I find such blissful happiness within the confines of my own mind, than I do in the reality that surrounds me.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.

Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel.

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)