Novelist as a Vocation

Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren’t accompanied by moral power they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words.

It’s easy enough to think and talk about ridding your mind of unnecessary things through a process of subtraction and simplification, but actually doing it is hard.

Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing, too.

Two principles guided me. The first was to omit all explanations. Instead, I would toss a variety of fragments—episodes, images, scenes, phrases—into that container called the novel and then try to join them together in a three-dimensional way. Second, I would try to make those connections in a space set entirely apart from conventional logic and l

Before we can say much about an artist’s style, we need to see an accumulated body of work. Otherwise there just isn’t enough to go on. We can’t really assess someone’s originality until we can line up a number of their works and examine them from a variety of angles.

Nor do I see the electronic media as a threat. The form and the medium aren’t all that important, and I don’t care if the words appear on paper or on a screen

A writer’s instinct and intuition derive less from logic and more from the level of determination brought to the task.

Once the habit of reading has taken hold—usually when we are very young—it cannot be easily dislodged.

good luck is, so to speak, simply an admission ticket.

In my opinion, an artist must fulfill the following three basic requirements to be deemed “original”: The artist must possess a clearly unique and individual style (of sound, language, or color). Moreover, that uniqueness should be immediately perceivable on first sight (or hearing). That style must have the power to update itself. It should grow w