If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.
Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.
I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff – movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album – I have my Mac.
I have the world’s best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.
There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.
There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.
The unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.
A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.
It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.
All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?
I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.
I think we tend to write out our phobias.
Trust, a sense of humor, and don’t let the sun go down on an argument without trying to make it up. That’s all I know about good marriage. I’ve been married a long time – it seems to be working.
I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They’re a way of relieving pressure.
Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.
Marriage is referred to in the bible as “mystical union,” and it really is in the sense that two people who don’t know each other get together. I’m always interested in how much you find out about the other person and how much you don’t find out.