The writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.
A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze.
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or making friends. It’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
