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But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it ...more

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...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

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The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal.

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Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

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What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

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As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he ...more

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The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says i...more

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There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what h...more

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... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

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He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

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But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

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What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief f...more

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Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

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One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashame...more

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The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance ab...more