A word after a word after a word is power.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
I am too old to have ever been very worried about what “genre” any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
It doesn’t really matter what “genre” your book is. What matters is that it’s a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.
I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?
I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.