#writing

"You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

"All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal."

"It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand."

"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"I write out of revenge."

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

"Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination."

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

"Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly."

"I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive."

"If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen."

"People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life."

"Your current circumstances are part of your redemption story He is writing."

"How could I live above the water or breathe under it. How could I swim in darkness consumed in an ocean of you? Falling or flying towards you, losing or finding myself in you and beauty was never the word to catch all that you are. For now I know the means of the infinite and it all starts and ends with you."

"...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands."