As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.
I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you’ve already done the good writing, you’ll still need the good luck. It’s a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they’re a mouthy lot and they don’t line up and salute very easily.
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that – you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.
I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?
I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.