Contents of A Writer's Mind

A great fictional world is the sum of details that to most readers are unknown.

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.

A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing.

Writing is more than a gift. It is a struggle that blesses those who see it through to the end.

When I write, my brain moves faster than my hands so I’m always trying to picture things.

Writers, when they write, need to approach things for the first time each time.

Write while the heat is in you… The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

You go where the story leads you.

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

A real book is not one that’s read, but one that reads us.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.