Writing

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

"Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty."

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

"unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it"

"Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

"This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice."

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."

"I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself."

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."

"You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself... It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional."

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money."

"Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."

"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."

"Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need."