I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.
For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.
What’s so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I’ve always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.
I truly believe the art’s larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.
I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
I got a degree in sociology, didn’t read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.
Don’t outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: “We write what we don’t know we know.”
Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.
That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it’s self-consciousness.
Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.
If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author – you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care – easier said than done.
I’ve learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.
I’m one of those writers who can’t talk about what they’re working on. The entire four years I was writing ‘House of Sand and Fog,’ my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.
I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It’s an honest descent into darkness. And you can’t have the joy without the grief – it’s why we listen to Mozart’s ‘Requiem.’
My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I’m not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.
Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.