The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers y….

our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to e….

I spent the morning smashing fliesI killed one fly against the doorjamb. Another I stalked into the kitchen...A third fly wavered by the kitchen wind….

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written..

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely..

We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we ….

The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sac….

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most imp….

Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world..

How we learn is what we learn..

What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the ac….

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds..

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith..

Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences..

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing..