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.
Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father.
I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don’t think it was my natural makeup. I don’t think its anyone’s natural makeup to be a violent brawler.
For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.
One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I’ve had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I’ve brought readers to my dad’s work. I can’t tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father’s work was masterful.
Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.
What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.