Writing

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

Your necessary fire is not only necessary for you, it is necessary to the world itself.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Sometimes we need an event to shock us into the present. Some of us require a catastrophic experience to remind us that we are indeed alive. Others know this from their reading of poetry — a somewhat less traumatic experience.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

I had to take off the teacher mask, which so many of us put on at the beginning; the mask that says: 'Well, I'm the teacher and I know it all. You sit there and I'll tell you.'

I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind's disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So, from my point of view, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

Learn to love the process of revision — in your writing and in your life. Don't be afraid of the editing.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. It required no intellectual effort whatsoever. Suddenly he was elevated to a plane from which he could look down upon ordinary people.

Keep a journal. Knowing you're going to write something every day sharpens your attention to everything that happens. For the longest time, I didn't keep a journal, and as a result much of my pretty long and interesting life is lost to me.