I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this., New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Pencil. Paper. Forget the world.
There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When i...
Art is a journey of excellence not a goal of perfection.
Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I woul...
The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
Consuming the content and culture of creatives does not make one a creative. Creating makes a creative.
Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Passion is a deep love for sacred activity.
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
[When asked for her advice to aspiring writers] Run! Just kidding. Sort of. Really, I think the best advice I can give is to wait for the book that compels you to write it-- the one that you eat, slee...
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I...
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flo...
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so
Sometimes, to love people, I must completely avoid them. Sometimes, to be strong, I must completely fall apart. Sometimes, to create, I must completely destroy.
Every creative act, however small, enriches our species and the world around us. To find and nurture talent, is to be truly wealthy.
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