writing

"...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining."

"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."

"No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness."

"You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me."

"Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"At the end of the day I went to this place where your memories left footsteps on my skin and the breath of your touch stained my desire. Yea, it was one of those nights where I needed you the most."

"I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write."

"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its"(no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's"(with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill"response in the average stickler."

"She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity."

"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up."

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause."

"Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost."

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."

"Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted."

"But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]"

"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."