The things that make you a functional citizen in society – manners, discretion, cordiality – don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels...

It’s okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn’t last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much....

You live and then you die, I thought. It’s good to have some good times.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make...

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and...

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand....

In the past few years I’ve assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people — people who supposedly want to write...

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Writing is the act of discovery.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

I don’t think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path...

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his...

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were...

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway…Awakening does not feed ego’s needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn’t...

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and...

Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God.

Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it

We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There’s a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but...

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me… I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I...

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand...