writers

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

We writers are resilient souls.

...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time.

The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

Writers are compulsive liars desperately trying to tell themselves the truth.

They were learning that New York had another life, too _ subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city _ a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.

My view on writers? We all have the same shovels, but never dig in the same places or to the exact same depth

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

The sea of reporters on her lawn made Loretta Brooks do a double take.

The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.