on writing

“I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go. You might as well be dead.”

making art is hard. there is no cheat code that would make it easy. excavating the soul should be hard; it would be alarming if it wasn’t. the satisfaction you feel, however, when you see the words trooping along the page exactly as you dreamed them up, melodic and honest; it is heaven made real.

“I think since I wrote ‘The Poppy War’ I’ve had this enormous fear of arrested development. I think it is really dangerous for professional success to come to you too early, because then you start thinking, Oh, what I did when I was a child is sufficient. The only way around this is to be deeply critical of everything I’ve done before and try to... See more