Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to lum….

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page..

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree..

What is the pattern of change?.

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emot….

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent ti….

Reject without regret whatever seems on reflection wrongheaded, dull, destructive, or irrelevant to your vision. It’s just as important to be able to….

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conf….

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it..

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant..

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order..

Right now-whether you're in writing courses getting "paid" in credit for writing, or burdened and distracted by earning a living and changing diapers….

In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death..

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate..

In Literature, only trouble is interesting..