Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

Christopher Bram

I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never been the subjects of novels, and in all likelihood, will never be.

Michael Cunningham

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

Christopher Bram

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.

Christopher Bram

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

Christopher Bram

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.

Robert De Niro

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Charlotte Eriksson

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.

Shannon Celebi

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

Joy Williams

People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.

Olivia Laing

The difference between writers and readers is similar to the difference between expressionism and impressionism. Writers want to express themselves and readers want to be impressed.

Claire Amber

Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

Crystal Evans

Write a page a day and you'll have a complete novel in year.

Harry Whittington

I before E except after C. Weird?By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.I think all writers are weird.

Day Parker

(musicians always make straight for the piano in anybody’s house, unlike writers, who can ignore a typewriter in the same room forever.)” -- margaret case harriman

Margaret Harriman

I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser.Well, let’s talk Algeria then. Let’s talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.

Rawi Hage

Please then, can we stop this obsession with the tiny minority of writers who have made a fortune from their work, and/or those who look hot in their author pics. Please can we also stop dissolving into factions of the bestselling, the midlist, the self-published, the Hampstead-dwelling, those who like to write cheerful stories and those who prefer to write grim ones. And instead take a proper and considered look at the future of the entire profession of writing.

Caroline Sanderson

Authors are but the instrument to be played. The art is inside them, but many people help create it.

Love The Stacks Bookstore

Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

David Chuka

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

Christopher Bram

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

Christopher Bram

Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She’s a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being “in the mood” to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period. So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around.

Darynda Jones

Art is long and life is short.

Christopher Bram

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

Christopher Bram

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read

Khaled Hosseini

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Christopher Bram

Trust the tale, not the teller.

Christopher Bram

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

Christopher Bram

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

Christopher Bram

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.

Renata Adler

Writers,” Esther said simply. “For some reason, a lot of you reject what you hear and see in your heads. If you go too long ignoring it, it builds up and then you do all sorts of weird things. Mumble to yourself. Nightmares. Daydreams. Total anarchy and chaos. Before you know it, the writer is either sitting in a corner feverishly humming to his- or herself or on Prozac.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

Michael Cunningham

If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

Shanda Trofe Write from the Heart

I'm not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.

Mark A. Cooper

Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.

Robert Galbraith

Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.

Robert Galbraith

It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.

Robert E. Howard

Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay.

Dani Shapiro

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we give a map to our most secret feelings. Why do writers do it? Perhaps because we'd be crazier still if we didn't.

Leland Dirks

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Dani Shapiro

Writers leave a trail of magic everywhere they go.

Jo Linsdell

Every artist takes their final work to the grave.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

Robert Black

But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.

Naomi Wood

One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.

Patricia C. Wrede

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.

George Jean Nathan

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

William Saroyan

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that’s what writers do, they make contexts.

Paul Shepheard

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.

Aleksandar Hemon

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.

Nikita Dudani

My only wish is to be buried with my books.

Nikita Dudani

When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there's a part of them that believes--nay, knows--the world turns for them. Most are harmless. Some are obnoxious. Some are Bret Easton Ellis.

Hannah Strom-Martin

A writer is never just looking out of a window or staring into space. They are building a universe to share with the world

Brenda Ashworth Barry

The truth is that most writers are needy.

Stephen King

If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.

Dani Shapiro

Asking a writer why they like to write {in the theoretical sense of the question} is like asking a person why they breathe. For me, writing is a natural reflex to the beauty, the events, and the people I see around me. As Anais Nin put it, "We write to taste life twice." I live and then I write. The one transfers to the other, for me, in a gentle, necessary way. As prosaic as it sounds, I believe I process by writing. Part of the way I deal with stressful situations, catty people, or great joy or great trials in my own life is by conjuring it onto paper in some way; a journal entry, a blog post, my writing notebook, or my latest story. While I am a fair conversationalist, my real forte is expressing myself in words on paper. If I leave it all chasing round my head like rabbits in a warren, I'm apt to become a bug-bear to live with and my family would not thank me. Some people need counselors. Some people need long, drawn-out phone-calls with a trusted friend. Some people need to go out for a run. I need to get away to a quiet, lonesome corner--preferably on the front steps at gloaming with the North Star trembling against the darkening blue. I need to set my pen fiercely against the page {for at such moments I must be writing--not typing.} and I need to convert the stress or excitement or happiness into something to be shared with another person.The beauty of the relationship between reading and writing is its give-and-take dynamic. For years I gathered and read every book in the near vicinity and absorbed tale upon tale, story upon story, adventures and sagas and dramas and classics. I fed my fancy, my tastes, and my ideas upon good books and thus those aspects of myself grew up to be none too shabby. When I began to employ my fancy, tastes, and ideas in writing my own books, the dawning of a strange and wonderful idea tinged the horizon of thought with blush-rose colors: If I persisted and worked hard and poured myself into the craft, I could create one of those books. One of the heart-books that foster a love of reading and even writing in another person somewhere. I could have a hand in forming another person's mind. A great responsibility and a great privilege that, and one I would love to be a party to. Books can change a person. I am a firm believer in that. I cannot tell you how many sentiments or noble ideas or parts of my own personality are woven from threads of things I've read over the years. I hoard quotations and shadows of quotations and general impressions of books like a tzar of Russia hoards his icy treasures. They make up a large part of who I am. I think it's worth saying again: books can change a person. For better or for worse. As a writer it's my two-edged gift to be able to slay or heal where I will. It's my responsibility to wield that weapon aright and do only good with my words. Or only purposeful cutting. I am not set against the surgeon's method of butchery--the nicking of a person's spirit, the rubbing in of a salty, stinging salve, and the ultimate healing-over of that wound that makes for a healthier person in the end. It's the bitter herbs that heal the best, so now and again you might be called upon to write something with more cayenne than honey about it. But the end must be good. We cannot let the Light fade from our words.

Rachel Heffington

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. n The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. n The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. n Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. n Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. n The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. n

Ezra Pound

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