writing

"A follow-up letter is best when not written on the back of a suicide note. Remember this next time you’re at a networking event, unless your new connection is a mortician."

"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."

"I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r"

"Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves."

"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

"Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it."

"The first draft of anything is shit."

"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

"He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"

"The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again."

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"He’s an indulgent sort of man……With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships."

"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"Love isn’t in a hurry like a flurry of flowery words on paper. It’s lush and slow to grow its aroma in the garden of time."

"When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof."

"If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer."