It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
