Writing became a tool I used to digest my life and understand, finally, the grace, the gratitude I could feel, not because everything was hunky-dory, but because we can use everything we are.
We're always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It's not fun. The life of an artist isn't easy. You're never free unless you are doing your art.
This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.
It was my own human mind. I needed to understand it. Why? It's the writer's landscape. Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its ey...
I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
It is Simone I want to visit in her cramped grave. To thank her for a single line in The Second Sex that I read in my midtwenties. It rang in my head like a bell, tolling the direction to my future. I...
Can’t take myself too seriously when I open
Why else are first thoughts so energizing? Because they have to do with freshness and inspiration. Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself, and first...
Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.
There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing o...
SIT DOWN WITH THE plan to write something you have always wanted to write but have never managed to get around to. This time, though, you are not timing yourself. You are sitting down with the determi...
In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.
If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.
Accept loss forever Be submissive to everything, open, listening No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge Be in love with your life
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 how the w...
Write about leaving. Approach it any way you want. Write about your divorce, leaving the house this morning, or a friend dying.
What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that the moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait...
Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.
It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.
It is our hope that writing releases us. Instead maybe it deepens the echo. We call out to our past and the call comes back. We are alone--and not alone.