What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writer….

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book..

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, an….

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, an….

Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a s….

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentat….

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author -….

One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to….

I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher..

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I….

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself..

For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of l….

As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried ver….

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see wher….

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it..

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad..

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved..

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined..

The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other..

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness..