“Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer th...”

“We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until youre not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you care abo...”

“Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.”

“Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.”

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

“Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.”

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”