"Trying to be the same as everyone else is a strategy that kind of works in school.  When you get out into the world, it is differences that make you glorious."

"Wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that."

"I'm fortunate that so many major players in my early life [and memoirs] don't read books."

"Success is something that must be defined on your terms.  Let no one else define it for you."

"The truly enduring stories, the narratives we encourage our friends to pick up and which happily make money for their creators over decades, the stories that outlast their creators, are the ones that reveal some core human truth."

"In 1974, J.D. Salinger told the New York Times that while he was still writing, publication was no longer his concern.  'There's a marvelous peace in not publishing,' he said.  'Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.'"

"Stop thinking about all the reasons you have not to write your memoir and what people in your family might think and just get busy writing it."

"'Work hard,' is not only the most important, but actually, essential. I believe that if you didn't have to work for something, it can't truly be considered success. Luck doesn't count. I think success is allowed a certain pride and you can’t be proud of luck or even of being born smart, artistic, or talented. It's what you do with it that counts."

"Resist deep longing for approval.  One needs to write not what a public wants but what it needs.  The first kind of work is what your need for approval will generate; the second is what your struggle will bring forth."

"We were talking about Jack Nicholson, and that level of aspiration for the film [based on my novel].  What happened was a change in the hierarchy at Warner Brothers, and the people who had brought the project in no longer had power.  That was the first time that happened.  But it happened over and over.  You don't know what to believe, and you never know for sure why you're getting turned down, or even why they were interested in you in the first place."

"My views are a natural part of my writing.  I am who I am.  That shapes how I see the world and how I narrate it.  I don't know that there's any separating one's views from one's writing.  Journalists often talk about impartiality and treat it as a holy grail—but I don't know that anyone is impartial."

"With creative people strongly gifted ... [your natural self] is very prominent, no matter what you do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints."

"Your mother is not reading what you have written. These words are your private preserve until the day they’re published."

"Sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving."

"I am the author of one of the most banned and challenged books in American history [The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian] and that makes me giddy with joy."

"In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters.  As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power."

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"Write what you want to write.  Which is to say: Ignore the market.  Which is to say: Just because dystopian young adult fiction sells well, if that fiction doesn't light you up, write whatever does.  Which is another way of saying: Follow your bliss."

"It's optional.  Writers should only engage in social media if they want to.  If you don't want to or if you're doing it halfheartedly, it shows.  I think it's important for writers to not think in terms of platform.  It's not healthy. ... Yes, I have a platform, and it would be disingenuous to deny that.  But in terms of getting to that place, I was just myself."

"No one wants to buy a [self-help] book that proclaims such a measured, modest message from its cover.  To sell big, you have to over-promise."

"You can't lie to yourself if you're going to be a memoirist.  Our personal failures and limitations and weak or fragile spots are the most interesting things to read about.  Again, it comes back to telling the truth as opposed to the thing we wish were true or ought to be true or assume at first glance to be true.  I think a memoirist really has to be willing to—not necessarily comfortable with—revealing their deepest emotions, motivations, and actions on the page for anyone to view and judge."

"With Art as forceps, pull that Truth."

"Writing 20 books in your career is wonderful; I wish I had written as much.  But ultimately I'd rather write the best book I can write no matter how long it takes me than the best book I can write fast simply because the unrelenting pace of our society demands speed in all things. "

"You go in with these extremely high hopes.  I don't know why after a while you have those hopes, because it's very hard to continue to be serious about writing screenplays.  You get cynical, and you feel like the money's the only thing."

"I used to worry about [negative criticism of my work] until I realized that if you look at the great attacks on literature in the last hundred years or so, they were almost all carried out by people who had not read the work in question."

"This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day. This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary."

"I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren't any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for."

"When we show our work too soon, we are abdicating authority over it. Certainly there comes a point where we need a fresh eye, but until we have done all we can do, we jeopardize our relationship to our initial impulse."

"It's still very possible to make money writing pure spectacle—there will always be a brisk market for porn and explosions."

"The urge to produce another—to redeem the first book by writing a second—led to my own spurt of inefficient frenzy, which didn't result in anything of worth.  I was stalled, not be writer's block, but by the conviction that whatever I wrote had to be of superior worth."

"I encourage writers to not look at their reviews, and I usually don't." (artist)

"I want people to like the work, not me."

"Today, there is an over-sharing of our lives. ... I'm not on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm actually a private person.  I don't engage in any social media.  To me, it's really interesting how we negotiate the private life, the private self, and what we make public.  For me, it's easier to make 'art' public than just the day-to-day, blow-by-blow ad nauseam of every day life."

"Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut."

"We did lose some shops who only want to carry American-made goods, but we really don't view the world like that.  We feel more like citizens of the world, and we're wary of nationalist leanings.  It has made our brand stronger, improving the quality, but also providing a huge well of inspiration; the colors, textiles, and techniques we've learned in India have expanded our vocabulary greatly."

"Something Ben Stiller had said to me a few years earlier: 'When you're on a film set and you've got to make endless decisions, you have to realise that you can't be worried about people's feelings.'"

"For Lynch … His refusal to interrogate the images, sounds and ideas that make themselves known to him—often during the actual process of shooting—accounts not only for their uniqueness, but also for his occasional inability to articulate their precise meaning.  His desire is to 'speak directly' through the films, combined with a faith in the audience's own eyes and ears."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"Writers are a pretty insecure bunch, but I've never met one who blames their sales on their bad writing."

"As a general rule, I won't ever cut anything because I feel it makes me 'look bad' or is personally humiliating.  I am impervious to those considerations.  I lack a sense of personal discretion or protection in my work because I feel like, if this is what I do for a living, I have to do it 100 percent or not at all."

"If you do something peculiar and remarkable it might not be for mass consumption in your own country but there are 7 billion people in the world. People everywhere in the world will recognize and appreciate its innovation. A world cult is many times bigger than a single country's mainstream hit. So in the long run, being different can make commercial sense as well as artistic sense."

"Doing is being.

To have done's not enough;

To stuff yourself with doing—that's the game.

To name yourself each hour by what's done,

To tabulate your time at sunset's gun

And find yourself in acts

You could not know before the facts"

"There are gasps and shouts, even some violinistic cries. He has sent several people scurrying to the woods in fear, which is unfortunate, but it is the sort of thing that happens when one finds the words that truly come from within oneself."

"Like Cliffhanger.  More people have seen how they did the helicopter shot in that than people have seen the movie!  Magicians keep their secrets to themselves.  And they know that as soon as they tell, someone will say, 'Are you kidding me?  That's so simple."  It's horrifying to me, that they do that.  People don't realize it, but as soon as they hear or see that, something dies inside them.  They're deader than they were.  They're not, like, happy to know about this stuff.  They're happy not to know about it.  And they shouldn't know about it.  It's nothing to do with the film!  And will only ruin the film!  Why would they talk about it?"

"You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and content, of great books of the past."

"The antihero is always going to come back because it's an easy crutch.  It also appeals to people in the film business.  Especially the film business, because it's an immoral business."

"The practice of writing is a kind of self-instruction that no number of writing workshops can teach you.  You have to learn how to do it yourself.  The writing makes you a writer, it builds your discipline, enhances your talent, and draws froth the reserves of your character."

"The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reflect the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews.  He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation.  He must ask himself, 'What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?' and begin to pour this on paper." (artist)

"The broadest, most inoffensive, mainstream hits are so often the least 'talked about.' They just happen and wash over a disconcerting majority once a week. Again, this is fine if you just want commercial success but it's soul destroying if you have loftier ambitions."

"I'm constantly taking risks to move forward.  I believe that you have to go for what you want and figure the rest out later.  That's a good way of looking at the world: do what you feel is the best thing to move you forward, and don't let potential future pitfalls hold you back.  You can cross those bridges when you get there—everything will work itself out."

"It's always about execution. If I told you that I was going to write a story about a man who wakes up and finds he has turned into a beetle, there's a good chance you'd think it was a stupid idea. But Kafka has the power to make that not only a good story, but one that's actually shaped the way we think about short stories. ... Part of the answer is something about conviction, something about summoning the authority."

"It's easy to be fooled into thinking there's a magic program, a specific path that only others know about, or a unique but mysterious road that you should take with a set number of steps to reach your dreams.  Nonsense.  You decide when.  You decide how."

"That doesn't mean I'll just do whatever it takes to be paid. Especially not something like abandoning my professional standards, because that would throw the rest of my life out of balance."

"Creating music comes from a place of complete subjectivity, and that's the way it should be.  It starts from a place of having to be so in touch with yourself, your emotions, your perspective.  And there's a satisfaction that comes out of creating, which I think is selfish, but not in a negative way.  What you then do with the influence you may gain from putting that into the world is where you can really contribute to something beyond yourself."

"There are no rules.  The creative process is as mysterious and as personal as each of us. "

"Sometimes even still you get that look, as if the person listening is thinking, oh, you're one of THOSE. Here's a radical notion, then: get shut of the term 'self-published.' Forget 'indie.' Forget 'DIY.' Just be an author when you're being an author. Just be a publisher when you're being a publisher. (Or, go with a term I quite like, 'author-publisher.') People ask you what you do, you write books. People ask who you're published with, give them the name of your one-man publishing company. Or say, 'I did that shit myself.'"

"Here's a difficult concept to grasp and I'm sure I'll go to my grave trying to explain it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn't make it something to emulate. There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don't work as Stories."

"Few aspiring authors want a truly honest critique, especially if that critique advises them to toss their work in progress into the recycle bin and find another creative outlet.  That puts the reader in the unenviable position of trying to find nice things to say even when a manuscript is completely unsalvageable."

"You have to balance doing what you want with make a buck, which is hard.  But if you do what you love and keep that as a goal in your work, you'll find that people will eventually come to you for it.  Instead of you going to them for money, they'll come to you with money and hire you for who you are."

"Your only real responsibility as an artist is to get lost in and follow your obsessions as far as they go, because anything besides that is copying someone else or doing something that's not true to yourself."

"Ten years ago a friend loaned me Parable of the Sower and it completely changed my life.  It caused me to view art, sci-fi, and literature in completely new ways.  I was very moved by the way Butler was able to seamlessly weave in heavy subject matters as race, gender, and class without ever compromising the integrity of the sci-fi."

"Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. ... He didn't entirely enjoy the task.  The title of his article was 'Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.'  Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, 'There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.  Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar?  Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.'  McGrath's frustration here would seem to be about subject matter.  Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?"

"Today's writer is expected to craft an online identity while churning out everything from literary snacks to full-course feasts that threaten to be labeled TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read).  It's an exhausting scenario and, to compensate, many writers resort to templates that allow them to ape what has come before."

"Every painting I've produced falls short of my expectations.  They are my children, but they're all juvenile delinquents.  I'm not proud of them."

"Be a cocky little nobody. But work hard, be original and write about what you know."

"I was going to do something that I loved—and hopefully I'd be good at it—instead of doing something I was good at but didn't love." (on choosing acting over police science)

"I see a lot of people who want the things that come along with being a musician or artist, but don't know what they actually want to represent.  When you don't have a vision for what you want to put out there, it can lead to being influenced by those around you.  Everyone is going to have an opinion and give you advice and tell you how to do things.  But if you really want to do your thing and be successful doing something that's unique to you, then you need to have a clear idea of what you want.  You will be influenced by others, but you should have the strongest sense of what you're putting out there."

"The things you're not supposed to talk about in films are the same things you're not supposed to talk about at dinner parties: religion, politics and sex."

"We are seeking to create a story that amuses and entertains while capturing the complexity and truth of the human experience."

"When you're in art school, you're thrown into all of these vicious critiques.  But the point is to teach you that people's opinions can either have value or you can say, 'Fuck 'em!' and do what you do.  Someone will always think it's a piece of shit, so who cares what they think?  Just do what's important to you, hold yourself to the fire, make sure you're taking it seriously, and do the best you can.  That's enough."

"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying.  The more inward you become, the more universal you become."

"As soon as things get difficult, I walk away.  That's the great secret of creativity.  You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.  If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it.  You've got to say, 'Well, to hell with you.'  And the cat says, 'Wait a minute.  He's not behaving the way most humans do.'  Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: 'Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?'  Well, that's what an idea is.  See?  You just say, 'Well, hell, I don't need depression.  I don't need worry.  I don't need to push.'  The ideas will follow me.  When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them."

"I had the urge to do things differently, but school convinced me that was a problem.  In creative fields, being different is a good thing.  But until you can say you're a professional artist or performer, you're told that it's wrong to take a different path than everybody else.  You are described as awkward or difficult—so I was an awkward and difficult child."

"A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and—voilà!  We are the Creator!  Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!  Nothing could be further from true creativity.  Nothing could be more destructive."

"The world I see is not the world you see, mine is in me and yours is in you.  Essays are a way to reconcile these individual realities, to have my world meet yourself by taking an external experience or internal perception and reaching toward a universal meaning."

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

"They pay me absurd amounts of money for something that I would do for free."

"Whenever we do something to appease other people, it doesn't come across as genuine.  We want to make sure that we are constantly being ourselves, so we focus on developing our own work, and if mainstream outlets find us, then they have made a true discovery—we are not being pushed on them by a powerful PR firm."

"I believe that every writer must stand behind his work, and so completely and forever. To allow alterations or perversions of the work is unconscionable."

"Making music and being an artist in any way, really, stems from an essentially self-centered place.  Some people will say that they make music or art to give something to the world, to share it with people, because they think people need to hear it.  I think most of that is bullshit.  You create things because they come from a place that is purely you.  It is very self-centered, which is not a bad thing—it is just the nature of creativity." 

"If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life."

"I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that I believe you think."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with writing or creating with an audience in mind.  That's smart as long as you feel like you're part of that audience and you don't change or go against your own intuition an about what you should create in order to make them happy."

"I think that not going to art school was beneficial because that allowed me to find my own style.  When you study art, you become influenced by it.  And there's already so much we see on the internet that influences us as well."

"I work with three: my editor in the U.K., my editor in Australia, and my editor in America.  It does make it hard, because often their editorial reports contradict each other, so in the end, I have to make my own decision."

"Can you imagine William Faulkner [making a public appearance] in a bookstore?  He'd probably be blind drunk and would tell everyone to go fuck themselves."

"The more personality I put into my work, the more people respond to it.  I've realized that I don't have to only do what I think others expect from me or what I expect to get paid for."

"I find the culture silences—places people don't want to talk—and I build in them, I work in them. ... Because that's what an artist does. ... An artist points their finger in directions that not everyone wants to look."

"Even if you go to school and work a lot of internships, you can only really make your way through experience and the process of trial and error.  You have to come up with your own method of doing things if you want to do something truly unique."

"I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation.  I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own.  Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs."

"I don't want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use."

"Perhaps in part because they have fewer rules to follow, they must rely more on universal techniques and stay truer to their inner compasses. Without genre crutches to lean on they must walk the walk of true novelists. You can call them genre-bending if you like, but I call them genre-transcending. While they may establish a new category, they are genuine fiction masters."

"Playing shows has an immediacy that I'm not in control of ...  It took me a long time to enjoy that spontaneity and take chances.  It took me fucking up in front of a lot of people for a long time, and doing that enough times to realize that it doesn't matter: your intent is so much more important than the follow-through."

"That distinctive voice is so valuable that when it comes it will rise, I think.  You develop it and you stay with it and you have your own tone and style.  One would hope that it will stick, eventually.  You just have to let it rip sometimes."

"Of all the things I've learned about writing, this is the most important: There's a domain of excitement and eagerness and delight that can be astonishing.  It is a place of commitment and discovery and wonderment.  It is the far side of passion.  It is totality of purpose, an inspired obsession.  I like to call it stardrive.  It's the engine at the center of your personal starship.  It's your heart of brightness.  It is who you really are.  It is simply you—you are the source."

"In hesitation is thought.  In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping."

"As an actor, you need to embrace the darkness within you as well."

"Find what you love. Then fight like hell when people try to take it from you."

"Out-of-category authors have begun a journey that I wish all novelists would take: a journey away from what is comfortable and convention-bound to fiction that is free, courageous, inventive, and influential because it's utterly unique. It's a place where novelists don't obey genre rules, but summon them when they're useful and bend them to their own purposes."

"I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, and of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter."

"Say it with conviction and honesty.  The danger is apologising for it being powerful; you have to let it be powerful.  Don't be spineless and do a joke.  Have the guts to see it through."

"Something magical happened that night.  When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up.  I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character.  There was relating happening."

"I have this saying: 'There's no music playing when your dreams are coming true.'  That is the hustle.  The hustle is humbling and, at best, completely authentic and gracious."

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That's what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. [My wife] came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say 'You're this,' as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write."

"I'm trying to find truths that are underrepresented on screen, to embrace nuance and ambiguity."

"Let's allow ourselves to have fun, to take risks, to make wild choices, and always, to hold it all loosely.  We are after a sense of aliveness and surprise."

"By inquiring into what we feel strongly about, we are led directly to the seed of a powerful story."

"You also need the conviction to say something and not bookend it with some sort of apology or qualification."

"To write a story that truly surprises the reader, turns the reader's (and the writer's) preconceived notions inside out, requires unconditional empathy—the courage to imagine not just your hero's virtues but also his flaws in all their grotesque and destructive truth."

"It's time to stop asking for permission. Storytellers have been cast in a submissive role for a long time."

"Writing is a subjective sport, I'm afraid.  Strap on your helmet and flash your skinned knees with pride.  After all, only those with the courage to submit can be rejected."

Zen in the Art of Writing

"Cliché as the idea of the 'writer's responsibility' might sound, I felt it in my bones.  I had always felt it, despite having tried to keep it at bay for so many years."

"Sing for the teacher who told you that you couldn't sing."

"What we feel strongly about is that thing we want to stand on our rooftop and shout to the world, that thing we would die for, that thing we are uniquely qualified to express.  What we feel strongly about is not the plot, but rather the underlying meaning that drives the plot.  What is that thing?  Be curious.  Because that is what your story is about. "

"To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you."

"I like the idea that one day I'll do something that really works, even if I fear that I've been saying the same things for over thirty years."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"High-impact fiction requires high courage. It means not only doing something different, but delving into what matters to you: what terrifies, outrages, grieves, inspires, hurts, and heals you."

Harlan Ellison - "Pay the Writer"

"The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection."

"When you follow Must every day, you impact not only what you create for your work, but also who you become in your life. This is how your work and your life become one and the same. When you choose Must, what you create is yourself. It is a body of work. As you change, so too does the work. As you grow, so too does the creation."

"To write high-impact 21st-century fiction, you must start by becoming highly personal. Find your voice, yes, but more than that, challenge yourself to be unafraid, independent, open, aware, and true to your own heart. You must become your most authentic self."

"Vision needs solitude. Leadership needs solitude. Courage needs solitude. Because when our choices evolve from an internal place of sure-footed, rooted knowing, we become resilient, emboldened, and focused."

"The characters who resonate most widely today don't merely reflect our times, they reflect ourselves. That's true whether we're talking about genre fare, historicals, satire, or serious literary stuff. Revealing human truths means transcending tropes, peering into the past with fresh eyes, unearthing all that is hidden, and moving beyond what is easy and comfortable to write what is hard and even painful to face."

What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.

"When you know why you are here—what you were put on this earth to do—it is challenging to go back to life as you knew it and be satisfied."

"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes."

"If you want to write every day without fail, then you need to convince your subconscious that you're the type of author who writes every day. It needs to be a standard, an unwavering commitment to follow through every day."

Saving Mr. Banks

"It's not what an artist does that counts, but what he is."

"I'm interested in individuality, not originality for its own sake."

"If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write."

"Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge ... That's our job."

"Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive."

"As writers, we were driven to feature women like us, to tell our stories in a vernacular descriptive of our own lives, our hopes and fears, neuroses and dreams."

"Just write the stories you want to write.  If you are writing about authentic characters, we (agents, then editors, then readers) will care."

"Too many manuscripts tell their stories with timidity.  What's needed instead are explosive bursts of divinity: Eruptions of insight, booms of self-revelation, scenes that flare open in the dark, prose that sizzles like sparklers."

"The biggest entertainment in New York City is not Broadway, the Philharmonic or the Yankees: It's to go out to dinner with an interesting writer.  These are the most interesting people on the planet.  When they are able to decant that personality into a work of fiction, the rest of the world gets to experience for $24.95 what I get to experience for the going rate for a good meal for two in Manhattan."

"Does your work have fingerprints?  Is it something only you could have written?  Does it have a style—is it about individual passion and situations—that makes me feel I am getting to know you, a unique individual?

"What gives a story high impact is that which is most personal and passionate in its author.  That includes your own fears.  They are your compass.  They're directing you toward what unsettles.  And also to what matters."

"Don't talk to me in market speak.  Tell me about your characters and the crisis they are trapped in, and make it seem serious, big."

"You can't borrow awe.  You can't plot it into existence.  You can't provoke it through pretty words.  It has to come from you.  Your fiction will be awesome to the extent that you cut loose from convention, go to places that belong to you alone and embrace your godlike inner storyteller." (artist)

"When other novelists unsettle us, we praise them.  Yet when our own writing unsettles us, we worry."

"Today, thanks to certain pioneering authors, some great books, and some great movies and TV series, the wall between genre and mainstream fiction has become not a wall, but a river.  It can be forded or bridged."

"Writers seeking to break in are often so concerned with sounding salable that they put it before craft.  It's off-putting.  The more the writer seems focused on selling, the less genuine the craft tends to be.  Talk to me about your ideas, your characters, your worlds: That's how to excite me."

"Jane [helped me to learn to] shrug off snide reviews—from journalists ro readers.  Doing so enables me not to waste writing time fretting over the opinions of others."

"I want anyone who has ever had an idea shot down by a supposed authority to take heed.  I have to say, my gasted is totally flabbered that anyone would dissuade a student from pursuing something based on an idea alone."

"Act like a pro and charge money for your words or build your audience on social media where the only one profiting from your awesomeness is you, not some super-wealthy media mogul that's too cheap to pay writers."

"No one cares more about a writer's career than that writer.  You cede authority to other people at your own peril."

"Whatever you're doing, you should be passionate about.  If you're not, then say 'no'."

"The two most important things I've learned about writing are humility and emotional truth.  If you present the emotional truth of a situation, particularly in an essay or a poem, it transcends genre."

"It is our job as writers to do the work, have the courage to bring it out and present it to the world, because that's why we are here."

"You have to give yourself permission, say to yourself, 'I'm not foolish for wanting this.'  All writers have to fight the same fight.  I have to write 2,000 words today, no matter what.  That's my discipline, and that's me protecting the work."

"The more we write for free or insultingly low pay-rates, the less valuable we all become and the more our industry suffers."

"[Different creative mediums] are just both part of me and so they can't help but feed each other.  Anything that you work on, if you're being honest, shows your personality in it."

"If you write ordinary stuff for long enough, then that's going to become your default mode."

"If it's disorderly, whatever the even of situation was, then you should represent it that way.  If it had order, you should represent it that way."

"Even my publisher will say they just want more thrillers.  That's what feeds my family.  But I feel like if I did that, I wouldn't be being true to myself."

"Go to the border of California, throw your book over the fence and be sure they throw the money back at you.  Then get the hell out of there."

"Whatever it is you do, my advice is simple: Don't let anyone tell you no."

 "A good story occurs when the author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability in search of truths that otherwise go untold." (artist)

"None of these excuses are valid.  None. Zip.  Zilch. Zero.  They don't pass the plumber test: Would a plumber say this and not be laughed out of the room?  You're a professional.  Professionals do not work for free.  Period."

"I think the word is fearless because once writers start editing how they do what they do or what they're writing about, I think you've already lost what you need to be doing. So I think being a writer is emotionally brave, and if you can't go there, maybe you're not ready to do it yet."

"I didn't follow my gut.  After that, I said, I'm never doing that again.  And the book after that, when I went back to doing what I wanted to do, wound up being, at that point in time, the bestselling book we ever did."

"The thing I did right was I was incredibly persistent.  I never gave up; I never didn't believe.  My attitude was, I don't care what it takes, this is what I want."

"Have the courage to go forth and do not what everybody else is doing but what you want to do."

"The X factor on every page is, does the writer love what they're writing about?  Anything you love that you've read in your life, from Page 1, you feel the writer's passion.  That's the thing that you can't put your finger on."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.)"

"Sheer egoism ... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity."

"Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is."

"To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it."

"No art ever came out of not risking your neck."

"Fiction's not a place for hiding.  Your skin is in the game, from the moment you begin."

"At the end of the day, that's what keeps them reading: you giving the story (and by proxy, the reader) all you've got to give."

"I say this with great honesty: I always approach a book by writing about the thing that keeps me up at night.  What is really waking me up or keeping me from falling asleep?  What am I grappling with?  And then I think, I cannot be the only one on this planet thinking about this right now.  I can't be the only one worried about this.  I start with whatever that experience is, and I just keep peeling it until it's more of the raw experience, and that's where I think fiction steps in."

"There is no way to write.  There's only the way you find to write."

"You have to write what is in your heart and your mind and your imagination, and that's the place where it has to come from.  I don't think that looking at what sells is the way to start a novel or a work of nonfiction.  I get about 200 books a week at my house.  I'm always waiting to be surprised or bowled over.  You don't want to be bored."

"Let the words come out of you and then they will be true."

"Staying creative for life means remembering (sometimes on a daily basis) your original why: why you write, why writing matters to you.  It means holding onto what's personal and even private in the pursuit, and holding close what's most meaningful."

"Become who you are."

"Some books, because [Stephen King] has a critical following, people tear apart—but the next book might be considered an instant classic.  He's not afraid."

"I want to be able to express all the currents that flow inside me.  To have that agility to reach a state of otherness and yet express my own internal truth at the same time."

"Put the "author" in 'authority.'"

"I was discouraged very early in my college years by people who told me I wasn't a real writer because I didn't write every day.  Things like that should not be said.  And anybody who says anything to you like that, you have to ignore them.  You know, there are no rules."

"I always distrust overly specific writing advice.  I don't agree with it, necessarily.  When you're thinking about what to write or how to write something, it's too easy to make a lot of arbitrary rules for yourself.  I think the difficult thing with learning how to write is not learning the style or rules, but figuring out what story you want to tell."

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.  All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up." (artist)

"Great poetry or even excellent poetry is written by people who are not afraid to reveal their flaws."

"I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart."

"You're going to be, and probably always have been, led to avert your eyes. But turning from that path is what it means to be an artist. You need courage, and that's something I can't teach you. I can teach you that you've got to have it."

"Write.  And read.  Read and write daily and listen to your gut.  Trust yourself and take yourself seriously.  Close out distractions.  Choose your own influences."

"You have to be patient and humble and unashamed to do that crafting."

"The key to living a creative life is to trust your sense of things, to trust that your output—even a sketch or hastily scribbled poem on the back of an envelope—is worthwhile."

"Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are.  Resistance is futile."

"Try not to please anyone or any particular audience.  Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well."

"Sooner or later we have to face who we are in the world around us.  We have to respond.  Eventually, we have to speak from the truest parts of ourselves."

"Write the poem you would never show anyone."

"If your writing can't touch on the whole range of emotions from joy to despair—if you are somehow protecting yourself from feeling in order to buttress your sheltered ego, you are not writing.  You are not living, either." (artist)

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."

"There's a battle going on inside all of us, why not acknowledge that this battle is what defines us as humans and start writing about how it feels to be in this perpetual battle?"

"You have to be ruthless.  There comes a point when you know in your gut something just isn't working, or isn't as good as it should be."

"Cut your heart out of your chest, clutch it in your fist, and slam it down onto the paper.  That is the real meaning of write what you know, which is probably written as, write with total fucking honesty.  Take all that shit that lurks inside you, all your fears and wants and experiences, all your neuroses and psychoses and loves and loathings, all your hopes and dreams and memories, and inject 'em into your work." (artist)

"In the end, though, every line is autobiographical simply because it has come from me.  There is no other explanation.  I'm not conducting a literary seance: I am putting the words on the page, and I must take full responsibility for what are, in essence, my words."

"Using clichés is basically plagiarism, except instead of stealing from a single writer you're borrowing from the collective consciousness supported by all language."

"As an artist, you want as many people to see your work as possible with no compromise.  .... I don't want to .... have it watered down, and follow a soap opera, and have all the edges filed down and have someone interfere.  ....  Delivering the exact thing that I made ... that's so important to me, you know, that's, I said, the ideal of the most beautiful and purest thing. And it's how little it can be ruined from your brain to the observer. And that's the way you do everything yourself, really, because, you know, I've probably only produced and directed to protect my writing, the idea, you know?"

"All I can do is write a better book and one that I'm proud of.  I can't meet everyone's expectations, but I can strive to meet my own."

"For virtually all novelists, the challenge is to push farther, go deeper, and get mean and nasty."

"The first piece you write that your family hates means you've found your voice."

"Everyone is impressed that we write until we write about them."

"I believe that the best art tells the most truth about life."

"The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always."

"I think Rimbaud said it best when he said if you're telling the truth, you bring back the shape of the thing... but I think what he was talking about was, really, bringing something like emotional honesty to whatever you're writing.  If you do that, then the shape of the piece, of the writing, becomes so much more of a pleasure, because you're really excavating something that's unique to you, which is the emotional truth of the situation."

"Don't censor yourself.  Don't chase trends.  Write whatever is in your heart.  If it's honest, you will find an audience."

"The reader will forgive you anything except lying."

"I will take you, my audience, to a miraculous world, but to do this, you will need to agree to my terms, that the drama will be tied to sentences, that characters will be defined in words, and the wonders will exist in the traditional way, with short stories that muscle across the page."

"The truth comes out of many perspectives, not just one.  You get a different story when you ask four people to tell it than when you ask one person."

"Everybody has something that's some gift, some manner of speaking or a way of speaking or a way of looking at the world that's singular to you."

"Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you."

"I think being a writer is emotionally brave, and if you can't go there, maybe you're not ready to do it yet."

"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes."

"I think the better use of research is talking to people where they develop a trust and tell you their greatest story.  If you go in there and you know what you want to write and you just want to write it, then why bother them?  But you're there and taking their time because they have something amazing to share, and as a writer, all you're doing is trying to look through someone else's eyes."

"I'm going to keep doing it my way until someone says, 'You can't do it anymore,' and I think that's the only way to do it."

"Dangerous writing is not serial killers or speed-crazed race car drivers.  What makes writing dangerous is something much more personal. To write dangerous is something much more personal.  To write dangerous is to go to parts of ourselves that we know exist but try to ignore—parts that are sad, sore; parts that are silent, and heavy.  Taboo.  Things that won't leave us alone."

"As long as I can get exactly what's in my head with minimum compromise, I don't care where it's going. I don't care if, in five years' time, they've discovered telepathy, that I can just have ideas and blink and people get them all around the world. You know, we don't know what the medium's going to be, so I'll have whatever delivers the purest idea that I have to the most people."

"Be fearless about telling the truth because that's where the rich writing is going to come from."

"When I did comic books for the first time, people told me, 'You're going to wreck your career.  You're a novelist, why are you lowering yourself?'  And I thought, What are you talking about?  There's no pyramid with literary fiction at the top and everything else at the bottom.  It's a flat line.  It's just a matter of how you want to tell your story.  And I just like being able to walk across that line." (artist)

"I think that most people who take offense are offended because they confuse the target of the joke with the subject of a joke. If you deal in taboo subjects—which I do, for a very good reason—just to bring up any subject that makes them feel comfortable and they straightaway assume it is 'wrong.' Well, it's not wrong. 'You haven't listened to the joke,' you know? People say to me, 'Is there anything you shouldn't joke about?' The answer is, 'No, it depends on what the joke is.' They wouldn't ask you, 'Is there anything you wouldn't write about?' You'd go, 'No, I could write about anything. It's what you say that counts.' Exactly. And the same with a comedian. You can joke about anything. It depends what the joke is and what side you come down on, where you land, you know?"

"Now I believe a writer is someone who writes. Maybe you get paid. Maybe you don't. Maybe people agree. Maybe they don't. You don't need anyone's approval or acceptance or imprimatur or validation to consider yourself a writer. But legacy pundits like agents and publishers don't want you to believe that. They want you to feel that the only way you can call yourself a writer is if they agree. And their approval comes at a high cost.  The legacy world doesn't want you to feel like you're a writer if all you do is self-publish. Because they need you to make money.  Your peers may not consider you a writer if all you do is self-publish. Because they need to protect their own identities, and that means dismissing yours.  You may not feel like a writer until you meet certain criteria. But consider this: who sets those criteria? You? Or an industry that wants to make money off of you?  Readers don't care. Readers just want a good book. Maybe we all should worry less about labeling, and more about writing. ...Writers write. Depending on your identity, that could empower you, or scare the crap out of you."

"No matter where you are in your career, whether you're published, unpublished or just starting out, walk through the world as a writer.  That's who you are, and that's what you want to be, and don't take any guff off anybody."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

"If you want to do it, don't question it.  Just do it."

"The most important thing I've learned is to trust my instincts.  My professor Kathryn Harrison had this interesting way of putting it, that it's like walking a tightrope, and you're doing it but, the minute you start having doubts or second-guessing yourself—that's when you start to lose your balance.  It took me a while to get to a place where I finally did trust my instincts, and it was very liberating.  From then on, I felt more confident to take risks in the writing and break the rules, if you will."

"It took me awhile to get to that place. But I think that once you have the confidence to write from your gut, that's when the magic really starts to happen."

"There are too many people trying to sound like someone else.  Be uniquely you, and your work will always find a home."

"If you go deep enough, if you reveal your truth in the most truthful way you can, it's universal.  And it helps people, I believe."

"The universe always rewards courage.  The more you move in the direction of what your gifts are, and what your life road is, the more people and events and experiences will conspire to give you what you need.  Write."

"Write what you want to write.  Write what you need to write.  Write what engages you, what interests you, what gets your blood pumping and your jaw tight.  Because what else are you going to do?  Platy it safe?  Write what everybody else is writing just because everybody else is writing it?  What's the point?  Why bring nothing new to the table?  Why fail to bring yourself and your passions to the page?"

"Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real.  In order for this to happen it is necessary to believe in the story one is working on."

"It's something you have to learn, how to tell the right stories for you, and it's this completely ineffable thing."

"Cast off the fear.  I was terrified about writing stories about where I came from because I was embarrassed.  Truly great writers are not afraid to bare their souls.  Sometimes you may feel like: 'I shouldn't have put that in there, I don't want people to think it's about me or look at me differently.'  Toss those thoughts aside.  That's a mental block.  Don't think about it.  Just do it.  As long as you write from a place of purity, and it comes from your heart, you can't go wrong."

"I'm my own worst critic.  Editors are always calling me a good writer.  To me, I'm a horrible writer, and I keep that mindset so I never get lax or comfortable."

"Know what you're trying to make; know it; practice it.  Just write, and write seriously, and don't worry about genre too much.  Create something brand new."

"Messages are for Western Union." (on social commentary in films)

"I wrote the kind of book I want to read.  I was as authentically myself as I could be.  That's tougher than some people would think."

"You've got to protect your voice and your vision from everybody, really.  Even the best-intentioned editors.  And I mean, I love my editor; I've been with Vicky Wilson for over 35 years.  She's wonderful, and her remarks on the finished manuscript are always terrific.  But I don't go to her to discuss a germinating idea."

"I'm afraid that I won't get it right.  That I'll bring too many biases.  That I won't see the lies."

"I'm just trying to be honest, as honest as I can.  If I were trying to write with the taste of the multitudes in mind, I'm afraid I'd never be able to finish anything."