"Becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating a writer’s temperament."

"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."

"I've seen teenagers just come alive with energy and joy when given the opportunity to express themselves creatively."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"I see major thematic and even dramatic similarities between all my books.  In novels, there's no masking one's interests and obsessions."

"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."

"[The author] then speaks in [his work] for all peoples, for the united psyches that overflow with thoughts and feelings that are registered by the wind, giving voice to the private, intimate, yet connected lives of men and women throughout the centuries—so that many people, listening to or reading the [author's work], hear their own inner voices also, and feel the contours of their own natures, and universal nature as well."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"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."

"That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita.  Style, she says, is rhythm—'the wave in the mind'—the wave, the rhythm, are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it."

"If you're truly worried about sounding too much like a specific author, read outside of your genre when you're writing."

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

"The claim some young writer makes each semester to me [is] that they don't want to read the writing of anyone else because it might damage their own creativity and squelch their voice.  Hard to believe, I realize, but I get myopic Kurt Vonnegut wannabes in my classes all the time. ... Reading helps [writers] find their own voice."

"'Don't read other authors while you're writing, or you'll end up sounding just like them.'  IF this were true, everyone would be reading Stephen King while writing their horror novels and we'd have oodles of people making 8 gazillion dollars because they sound a lot like Stephen King."

"What young writers always talk about—'finding your voice'—well, you can't find your own voice if you aren't listening for it.  The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it's doing.  Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry.  And so we get prose that goes 'clunk, clunk, clunk.'  And we don't know what's wrong with it."

"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?"

"I'm interested in transformation.  I'll take something that was fragile and delicate and transform it into something that is durable and rigid.  There is always this aspect for me of transcendence—something shifting, something changing."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"One of my favorite things about illustration is getting to delve into a writer's 'world.'"

"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."

"Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day."

"You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas?  Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.  Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day."

"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."

"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."

"[My films] mean different things to different people. Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It's okay. Just as long as there's not one message, spoon-fed. That's what films by committee end up being, and it's a real bummer to me ... Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too."

"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 used to think that some stories could only be written once by one person after they had lived many years thinking about that story.  I still believe that."

"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."

"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."

"Writers often revisit the same themes throughout their careers, examining them from various points of view."

It's Always an Apt Time for Revolution

The Great Discontent

Worlds of Wonder

"I tend to write about things from wherever I am standing, and that means I include possibly too much me in the things I write."

"High-impact 21st century fiction is built on unique voices, uncommon characters, and tales that can only be told by a particular author. They're sui generis."

"Being a writer is about presenting the way that you think to the world, and it doesn't really matter what kind of pieces you do, but you have a mindset and that's what you're bringing to the table."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"It is our job to ruin the perfection of the empty page. It is our job to disrupt the status quo: because that's what storytelling is. Taking a straight line and bending it, breaking it, shaping it into something far stranger and far greater. "

"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."

"Voice is what makes writing individual and compelling."

"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?

"To have a specific style is to be poor in speech."

"When it comes to the voice, if I'm consciously doing anything, I'm probably doing something wrong. ...There does need to come a time when you just have to let it fly."

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

"The idea, ultimately, is to develop a relationship with words that becomes central to your identity as a writer."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Each great memoir lives or dies based 100% on voice."

"You have to write a million words before you'll find your own voice."

"You'd have to be a literary critic or a psychiatrist to pick the writer out of his work.  Every fictional story goes through this sort of blender process where you take some real experience... you know what's real or true when you put it into the blender with fiction, and then it gets all mixed up with something that didn't really happen, but there's still a little of you in there.  I think the writer is in there no matter what you do. You can't really remove yourself from it."

"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."

"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."