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Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

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I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the ...more

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The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

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When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not ju...more

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For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

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For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and ...more

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I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break ...more

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I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of w...more

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I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate N...more

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When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ...more

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I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participa...more

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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is i...more

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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.