WRITE EVERYTHING YOU know about dying. Just go. Don’t think, What does she mean by that? Dive in. We die in all kinds of ways. Who died? When did they die? how? why?
This all happened fifteen years ago. A friend once told me: Trust in love and it will take you where you need to go. I want to add, Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you wher...
Explore the rugged edge of thought . Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.
We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.
And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.
There is no security no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago we will do it again. Actually every time we begin we wonder how we ever did it before.
We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.
Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that...
Anything you do fully is an alone journey.
Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
My desolation was that no one knew me and I did not know myself. My family's life was my life. I knew nothing else. I was clothed, fed, given a bed to sleep in, encouraged to marry early and rich, and...
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 -- read books...
If you never sit still, it does not even hint to that deeper self in you that you are interested. By practice, by showing up, we are signaling that deep motor, that hum of life, that we are ready: Hel...
If every time you sat down, you expected something great, writing would always be a great disappointment. Plus that expectation would also keep you from writing.
Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.
You have to let writing eat your life and follow it where it takes you. You fit into it; it doesn’t fit neatly into your life. It makes you wild.
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 not be afr...
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
When you draw and pay attention to what is, it's a form of being present. This inspires the mind, makes it happy, and the heart wants to express more.
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. We were he...