I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.
The music I write, I feel, is not the kind of music for a 25-year-old.
Find the story you want to tell. If you don't want to write it, find somebody to write it.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
I've never tried to define my states of mind when I write.
I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind.
I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
Anytime I write something that's trying to be too smart, it doesn't work.
I wrote when I was scared. It was all I knew to do- writing. It kept my fears firmly on the white paper before me rather than running loose around my head.
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing ...
What I like most about reading is I can read in minutes what it took the author hours to write. What I like most about writing is readers can read in minutes what it took me seconds to write.
Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
