writing

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"The thing I write will be the thing I write."

"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes."

"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."

"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome"doubt."

"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."

"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."

"Anything we fully do is an alone journey."

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

"Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things."

"When asked, "How do you write?"I invariably answer, "One word at a time,"and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope."

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]"

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty."

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

"Writer speaks a stench."

"Instead of reciting her an original love poem using words, I think I’ll use my tongue to more creatively explore the deepest parts of her."

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."