Quotes on Creative Writing

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The best style is the style you don't notice.