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

What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my foot size but, rather, make my feet fit the shoes.

A writer’s greatest responsibility is to his readers, to keep providing them with the best work that he is capable of turning out.

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

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.

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

When less time is taken between gathering information and acting on it, so that everyone becomes a critic or a news commentator, then the world becomes an edgier, less reflective place.

The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky.