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Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

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I do not put in long hours at the keys - or very seldom. Instead, I snatch time. I write in the crannies of my life.

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Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings,...more

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Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.

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Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of cou...more

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Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness

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No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too...more

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Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

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Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.

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If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There i...more

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We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because ...more

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Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

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The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Senten...more

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Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us in our own experience. It is a w...more

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Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where w...more