Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I’m sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader’s own life.
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
Planning to write is not writing.
I am telling you what I know – words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
We’re always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it’s a little raw and nervy.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.