“The possibility of truth has become a delusion to those who made their own disguise the truth.”

“Questions that will free you might have answers that will imprison you again.”

“Make sure you don't carry the burden of the whole world on your shoulders, just in case someone needed them to cry.”

“Write when you least feel like it,Because that's when you write best.”

“If you observe the pace of my breaths, you won't need to listen to my words.”

“Is it crazy to say that I sometimes don't understand what I write but I write it anyway, because maybe someone, somewhere, somehow, would feel what I didn't?”

“In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve fr...”

“There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.”

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot p...”

“He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Sh...”

“Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”