"I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind."

"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 collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write."

"The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world." (artist)

"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"I realized that if writing was going to take me away from my boys or my husband, then I wanted to find the joy and happiness in life and find ways to record that in my poems." 

"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 reading and entertainment choices have a direct impact on your success as a writer. If your days are spent looking at the 33 Epic Selfie Fails on Buzzfeed or keeping up with the Kardashians, then you’re limiting your ability to write something great. Garbage in, garbage out.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a fiction or a nonfiction writer—reading quality books is a good habit to build."

"Magic is a fascinating and primal thing.  What's most interesting is the psychology behind it.  People are desperate to experience wonder.  We are desperate to find mystery in our lives.  I believe it's innate; it's so hard-wired into our brains that we can't escape it."

"We should always be changing and inspired by new things."

"Kids shouldn't grow up thinking that the only thing of any importance is earning money.  They should be learning about culture, not business."

"You feel very alive constantly being one decision away from disaster."

"I also go out in the afternoons to shoot photographs.  I find that the process of training the eye to compose in the viewfinder helps me hone my ability to revise poems.   I've always loved the connections and cross-pollination between art forms."

"It is this heart we need for our own writing—one that moves to understand and expresses a deep connection to life, which is also what I take essayist to mean." 

"To preach that story is conflict, always to ask 'where's the conflict in your story?'—this needs some thinking about.  If you say that story is about conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely.  And, in a sense, making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters.  This is simply untrue.  To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one.  Conflict, of course, is part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood.  Stories are about a lot of different things."

"I'm a strong believer that creativity is the ability to play."

"Good fiction is not trying to imitate life or trying to reproduce what's going on in life.  Life serves as a catalyst, as a provocation that leads to something fictional that's interesting.  It creates a new world that has its own constraints, its own rules, and its own system that can really be intersting in and of itself.  It can also come back and teach us something about life.  There is a constantly circulating movement in the interchange between life and fiction."

"It's important to feed your mind with quality information daily. Only then is it possible to come up with great book ideas."

"Stay curious, look for inspiration in everything, and write it down.  You never know when you have a seed that you'll come back to."

"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."

"I had the privilege of saying my body was healthy for crying out loud, and ... I should make the most of my time and marvel at all I could and just sit myself down at the desk.  And so I did."

"I hear what I write.  I started writing poetry when I was really young.  I always hear it in my head.  I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual.  But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"Artists are not intellectuals.  We are sensualists, we are ravenous for life."

"I don't think one has to have a 'dysfunctional childhood' in order to write a fascinating memoir, but there definitely needs to be something.  And that 'something' could even be a gift for the observation of tiny, daily life."

"I can spend weeks without mentioning to anyone that I'm a writer.  I'm a minority these days, but I'm not certain it's a good thing for writers to spend a lot of time with other writers.  Solidarity and community are essential—I am not arguing against either—but when the majority of your friends are writers ... that seems to work for a lot of people, but that shit's just not for me."

"You need life experience. ... You can't tell someone how to think and feel in it, you have to be in it."

"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."

"The same way that a photographer is not fully conscious of why she snaps the picture, there is a similar experience for writers. We are attempting to capture something on the page, a fleeting thought, an experience that we can not quite articulate, an idea that we do not quite understand, and by placing these moments in the context of a story, these experiences can be transmitted to our reader as something larger than we are, something beyond our limited understanding."

"You should always try your hardest. The Office was the first thing I really tried my hardest at. I don't know why I started this radical new approach then, but I think it was one of those carpe diem type revelations. I came into the industry with a slightly older head on my shoulders than most and maybe deep down knew I shouldn't blow the opportunity. I put everything into it. A lifetime of experiences, and I couldn't have been prouder of the results. I don't even mean the success of the show, but simply the finished product. I was the laziest man in the world before I made The Office but now I'm addicted to that sort of success. Pride in my work. Now I'm a workaholic, because I realize that the hard work is sort of a reward in itself."

"By the time I started getting hit with 'Show, don't tell' as a screenwriter, I had already had enough experience under my belt to know that, as an overriding cinematic aesthetic, it was more or less bullshit."

"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."

"It took me 20 years of writing before I could write [Pulitzer Prize-winning] The Sympathizer.  I got to that point by writing a lot, reading a lot, and enduring a lot."

"The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel."

"You need to go on an adventure so you can write a new story."

"Your job is to look for surprises in the world.  And share them."

"Yell.  Jump.  Play.  Out-run those sons-of-bitches.  They'll never live the way you live.  Go do it."

"That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous."

"Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that 'each minute is valuable'—but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it."

"When you're stuck, when you need a jolt, when you crave to see things from a new perspective, it's time to play." (artist)

"When you live the fullness of your life, you lift the collective human experience.'

"Adults who take the time to play are more creative than those who don't." (artist)

"You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction."

 "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)

"Keep human!  See people, go places, drink if you feel like it."

"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."

"Writers write not because they know things but because they want to find things out.  And not just informational things - emotional ones, the whole landscape of human feeling, emotion and passion.  They want to experience things."

"I found myself blessing the secret mind... observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.  We never sit anything out.  We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.  The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"Do not just read the poets who sound like you and share your particular demographic or political beliefs, but read dangerously and adventurously."

"I don't want to live to document my moments. I don't want to see a sunset and reach for my iPhone. I don't want to live my life and love my loves inside out. I fear, sometimes, that I do. I fear for all of us."

"Stories come out of living, and looking, and reacting, and observing and thinking.  I can't explain what the source is. ... That's the experience of being alive and trying to render it coherent somehow."

"Write a story that draws its energy from the minor anxieties of day-to-day life, so that when it reaches its climax, the reader experiences genuine catharsis and feels temporarily purged of all those fears."

"This business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself: How alive am I willing to be?"

"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)

"Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us, we find poems."

"Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."

"What will elevate your work and make it your own is to live your life. Learn from your existence and borrow things from your day to day. Have adventures. Take risks. Put yourself into your fiction. Because life offers a kind of writing advice you just can't read about—it's something only you can experience."

"It's hard to write for bread.  So do something else, too, and understand that the something else will also fuel your writing."

"'Writer's guilt': A tension between desperately wanting to record life's richness, but knowing that pulling out my paper and pen will take me away from the beauty that surrounds me."

"How can you understand people if you're sitting in your room all day writing?"

"Just unclench, live your life and spend less time berating yourself.  Anxiety and stress are the enemies of creativity."

"It is impossible for me to separate this question [of the most important thing I've learned about writing] from the bigger ones about how to live."

"Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living—though you might not think so to look at most human beings—is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing."

"Eudora Welty said something to the effect of: 'All a writer has to do is sit on her own front porch.'  But I was thinking: 'I'll go run with the bulls; I'm going to dance in fountains."

"What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' ...It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given.  If we write simply about what we know, we never grow.  We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on.  We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves.  What one should write about is what interests one."

"I'm a big fan of telling young writers to take all the detours they possibly can, both in life and in writing.  Those detours are going to lead you to where you need to be.  If someone says, 'How would you like to spend two years working in the Czech Republic for the state department?,' you should do that.  You can always get back to your novel.  You need to have as many experiences as possible."