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I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I...more

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The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

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It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunsh...more

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So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

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The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in t...more

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Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

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We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces togeth...more

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Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited o...more

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Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

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Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

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You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don't. Th...more