You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won’t necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Writers who pretend that everything they’re doing is completely new are full of it.
Writing is a job: you must show up.
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can’t figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
I tend to start at 9 o’clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.
The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.
It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.
The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.
As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.
Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.
The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant.
My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
So, whenever I’m writing, I’m writing in the presence of all the other books I’ve read and I think we all are.
He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more – a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.