“For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.”
“Crown your kindness in the hands of a struggler. Your small lionhearted deed of today can become a courageous act of tomorrow.”
“One sentence can make a difference, and the writer of that sentence can be you.”
“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
“If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.”
“Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god. ”
“I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.”
“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I d be a politician.”
“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
“Language is the source of misunderstandings.”
“As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.”
“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn t copy it but moulds it to it s purpose.”
“I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.”
“And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking. ”