Novelist as a Vocation: The master storyteller on writing and creativity

even on days when I think I’m not feeling so great and don’t feel like running, I tell myself, “No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life,” and I go out and run without really ascribing a logical reason for it. That sentence has become a kind of mantra for me: No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean; there are plenty of oddball minor characters throughout the novel. It’s a long novel but holds my interest to the end.

What’s crucial, in short, is the physical act of rewriting. What carries more weight than anything else is the resolve to sit down at one’s desk to improve what one has written.

Living is (in most cases) a tiresome, lackadaisical, protracted battle. If you don’t make the effort to persist in pushing the body forward, then keeping a firm, positive hold over your will and soul becomes, in my opinion, realistically next to impossible.

over a long period of time I think I’ve constructed a system whereby readers and myself are connected by a stout pipeline that allows us to communicate. This is a system in which the media and the literary industry aren’t needed much as an intermediary. What’s needed most there is a natural, spontaneous sense of trust between author and readers.

Suppose, for example, that Beethoven had composed only one symphony in his life—the Ninth. How then would we evaluate him as a composer? Could we deduce the Ninth’s intrinsic significance, or its degree of originality, in isolation? I think it would be very difficult. Looking at his symphonies alone, I think it is only because we are able to see th

If you want to come face-to-face with the chaos inside you, then be silent and descend, alone, to the depths of your consciousness. The chaos we need to face, the real chaos that’s worth coming face-to-face with, is found precisely there. It’s hiding right there, at your very feet. And what you need to faithfully, sincerely verbalize this is a quie

if you lament that you lack the material you need to write, you are giving up way too easily. If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look. In the field of human endeavor, things that seem mundane at

the everyday combination of physical exercise and the intellectual process provides an ideal influence on the type of creative work the writer is engaged in.