And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like...
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastar...
I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day.
I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.
I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.
If travel has momentum and wants to stay in motion, as I mentioned earlier, then adventure has the gravitational pull of a black hole. The more you do it, the more you find a way to keep doing it.
My breathe would catch at the sight of violets-so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet's message was "Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in." p264
I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, "Never give up hope, spring will come.
I am a fireball of emotions and impulses; my zest for life is unquenchable. And I am either of only two things: Fire or Ice.
I am passionate about the things that I believe in like equality, free will, justice and love.
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito's birth changed all that.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
