“You begin every book as an amateur...I don t know anything in the beginning, which makes it great fun to write, you know? You don t know anything. You don t even know how to write. So you begin every book as an amateur and as a dummy. And in the writing, you discover the book. Of course, you re in charge. But gradually by writing sentence after sentence, the book, as it were, reveals itself through you to your language - through your language, rather. So each sentence is a revelation. I m not exaggerating. Each and every sentence is a revelation. And what you re trying to do is hook one sentence to the sentence before and the next one to that sentence. And as you do, you re building a house, you know? [But] the architect and the contractor, they know what the house will look like when it s done. And that s the big difference. I don t have any idea what it will look like when it s done.”
“Writing down this mission statement is also a great way to wake the page . That s the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It s the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas.”
“She asked me Do you enjoy your loneliness? And I said Yes I enjoy my loneliness. It gives me time to think and write.”
“Ever had a dream of flying? Being something more? For me, it is an endless objective. A welcomed reverie.”
“La escritura es una especie de sala de exposición, y un almacén que puede ayudar a crear un espacio para dar cabida a nuevas ideas y sentimientos. Si no pones estas historias por escrito, tu corazón se colmará de ellas y se romperá.”
“Writing happens while writing.”
“The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter s fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.”
“Deadlines are a great antidote to insecurity.”
“Authentic writing cannot be coerced.”
“To make the writing process easier for you, do more research. The more information you have about the topic you chose to write about, the more effective, easier and practical writing experience you will have, and the better reading material readers will get.”
“I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.”
“Writing to me is like hitting the herb. No problems, Mon. No worries.”
“Writing enables a person to build a protective barrier shielding them from an adverse environment, scrutinize their circumstances, and discover how to employ new perceptions to center oneself in a world filled with strife, conflict, violence, affection, beauty, splendor.”
“Writing fiction twists your brain in knots. You get to experience the life of a compulsive liar. You are constantly double-checking for consistency, acting as continuity supervisor for your own imagination. You become a detective, picking through the diary of a suspect; checking for the slip up that undermines the story and breaks the alibi. You wake up sweating about some detail that wrecks the timeline, or breaches the established character of the person you invented. You craft wonderful, frightening people, who you fall in love with, but must discard. You find brilliant twists that you can’t use because they somehow subtly compromise the story. It drains you. You can’t sleep. You are preoccupied with minutia. It’s brilliant.”
“Things happen for a reason. I believe that. For instance, I masturbated moments ago and now I’m searching for a reason…beyond the obvious.”
“I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”
“It had taken four months to write and she had felt something stir in her as she worked that she had thought was long dead.”