On Writing

Perhaps this is an obvious one, but please do not check your email or the news or your texts or your social media or anything like that right when you wake up. (Get a real clock; don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.)

I’m not one of those people who think you have to write from some sacred, semi-subconscious state of mind that’s closest to... See more

Joyce was in the habit of reading some of his own fiction to his pupils. After one of their lessons, Schmitz admitted that he, too, had been a writer once. Curious, Joyce asked to read his work, and Schmitz lent him his two novels. At their next lesson, Joyce arrived with an urgent question: “Do you know that you are a neglected writer?”

This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” James Baldwin: “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” Bob Dylan: “To be creative you’ve got to be... See more

‘I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved, all the cities I have visited.’

“That is part of the beauty of all literature . You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

If a writer ever achieved that perfect book, Faulkner said, there would be nothing left for him but suicide.

every single distraction you may point to as the reason you have not or cannot make your work is all the same thing—it’s always just your fear of what may or may not happen if you make your work.

something I never think about when I write a novel or a story, which is mainly designed to interact with another person on an intimate scale, in the silence of their reading experience.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”