My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there’s not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.
Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn’t make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.
The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.
I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I’ve given something up, but I can’t think of it.
I never really thought I’d be successful. I never though I’d get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.
I write every day and I just love doing it. It’s just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don’t work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don’t fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.
My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.
I laugh, that there’s a certain kind of cyclical nature to life and that I don’t have to worry because whatever isn’t there right now, it’s coming back again.
It hurts when they’re gone. And it doesn’t matter if it’s slow or fast, whether it’s a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they’re gone the world turns upside down and you’re left holding on, trying not to fall off.
The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.
Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don’t know until you’re ready to go that you can’t move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That’s the feeling. It doesn’t last, at least it doesn’t have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I’ve seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that’s okay because there’s always somebody around that’s happy to remind you.
Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.
The most important lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.
The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery. The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.
A man once told me that you step out of your door in the morning, and you are already in trouble. The only question is, are you on top of that trouble or not?
I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don’t believe that there’s a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.
Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.
The person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.