IntoxicatedWith the madnessI'm in love withMy sadnessBullshit beggars, enchanted kingdomFashion victims through their charcoaled teeth

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon

Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.

Most writers might as well write in invisible ink, because if what they’re writing is forgettable, it might as well be invisible too.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.