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.
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world’s commerce.
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.