In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Some build their castles ‘mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.

I want to drown in all the ink used to write positive things about my clone and how great he is.

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to...

Step back and scrutinize your work, to delve deep into the meaning behind the words, it will get both easier in some ways and harder in others. Either way, you need to practice everyday. You...

Pencil. Paper. Forget the world.

Love is the best drug, bar none.

Someone described a writer’s world as tormented, and I had to laugh. A tormented writer? I personally wouldn’t have put those two words together. Emotions have the power to torment a soul, yes, I agree...

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

I want to write the Boston Marathon of run-on sentences. And since it’ll be so long, I’ll replace all the commas with the word Gatorade, to help push people through it.

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that...

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very...

A writer must be a lifelong reader to be good. And if you want to be a great writer, I’d suggest trying to live a long life by reading the ingredients of the foods you...

Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it… the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing...

Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.

If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian...

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

If I could make money making armpit farts, I would. But since I can’t, I teach. And write.

A blanket would be a great surface to print my new book on, so you could read it in bed while you’re having boring, obligatory sex with your spouse, who’s as dry and exciting as...

if a book isn’t self-explanatory, then it isn’t worth reading.

I haven’t written in a week. It’s like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice—of the world, my body, others—in a way never before...

Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing...

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he...

What I like most about reading is I can read in minutes what it took the author hours to write. What I like most about writing is readers can read in minutes what it took...

I don’t get writers block. I get writer has too many ideas and doesn’t know which one to start next, block.

I meant to spend the day writing, but instead I spent the afternoon cleaning out my belly button. Historians will thank me one day.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

I’ve been writing for about eleven years. I went from elfish to elephantish, and in another eleven years I hope to be Levin.

I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my “literary” sins –The other kind don’t matter.

When a writer has deep thoughts, I expect him to also have a deep voice. And if he doesn’t, he should remain silent and let his writer’s voice do all the speaking for him.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also...

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many...

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling … I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt...

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,...

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Great work doesn’t make me jealous; it makes me want to work.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death’s gift to vulgar life so that it can live in...

Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us...

One can fight money only with money! from my Tale Of The Rock Pieces.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily...