Writing

"‘Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity,’ summoned not by any ‘external compulsion’ but ‘from within yourself’. You cannot do otherwise. And the same went for Saul: if it comes from within yourself, then you cannot do otherwise. No novelist can." - Martin Amis

"For the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms." - Ray Bradbury

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out." - Ray Bradbury

"Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness." - Ray Bradbury

"writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see… or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different." - Stephen King

"Because novels come from long-marinated and unregarded anxiety, from silent anxiety…" - Martin Amis

"The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you... See more

"Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered." - Martin Amis