“Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that s too much pressure and you ll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.”
“Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.”
“Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly trivial strand, only to discover it is attached to a longer strand; that one in turn is attached to an even bigger one. Sometimes, I find have tugged a whole, hidden tapestry of my past into view, one thread at a time.”
“I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office’s waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.”
“I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.”
“Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.”
“I had always felt things deeply, that was my nature. It was why I was a writer. Sometimes, the feelings were so huge, they needed a place to go.”
“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else s life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.”
“I m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.”
“I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.”
“... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don t whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.”
“Pulling pomes from a hat seems to be the easiest way to write.”
“A writer = a worried person picking up a pen, in the face of death, writing to unlimited strangers to say, “Look!”
“In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... What s its future? you ask? I don t know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my killed plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don t know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest. [Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]”
“When I m writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I m editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.”
“There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.”
“You have to stop and freeze the moment, he told me I had told her. You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”