I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.
It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet.
It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.
Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.
Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.
I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.
You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.
Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong – even if you’re the author.
Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
One of the things I’m concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don’t like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.
It has always been the perogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.
I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.
I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.
I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful.
We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.