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It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as 'The Author.'

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.