As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.
The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don’t have that.
Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?
It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they’re the basic places stories come from. They’re the clay that you make the bricks out of.
Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they’re on a tour.
I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area.
It’s not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers – we’re much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something’s in the world that wasn’t there before.
I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing’s a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.
Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I’d sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.
I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.
I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.
I’m somebody who considers happiness a journey, not a destination.
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.