A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
The great man say that life is pain,” Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. “That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit’ it. Now, if that ain’t the blues, I don’t know what is.
The law,” he continued, “is made by the rich people so that the poor people can’t get ahead...
Let me speak to your boss” I said. Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anymore collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It’s like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.
He said that a men’s work cloths are the only real cloths he has.
The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas.
I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on, but they’re explorers.
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don’t have to give up anything to do it.
Literature is the adventure. It’s the story, it’s the fight, it’s people falling in love, it’s people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That’s what great literature is.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
I’m writing, I’m using language, I’m using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I’ve always loved that.
A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day – every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.