“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.”

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obs...”

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sid...”

“But then, thats the beauty of writing storieseach one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, theres no feeling like it.", 3:AM Ma...”

“First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or ...”

“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keepi...”