We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.
A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.
The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' -- by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
I want to write the world’s worst cookbook, which I’ll title: “The World’s Worst Cookbook.” It’ll feature recipes from “Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” (peanut butter, jelly, and bread), to “Roasted Roadkill and Hitchhiker’s Surprise” (this recipe is a secret concoction handed down from my great grandfather to my grandfather, who told it to my dad just before he ran him over).
As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.
I wanted to write something that made no linear sense. None. Zero. Something that was 87% pure nonsense, 12% pure alcohol, and 3% orange juice, for a chaser. That formula is accurate, give or take 2% for the milk. In my experience, comedy is 2/3rds tragedy, and one third 33.3 percent. And tragedy started at birth, so humor involving babies is probably the funniest. But even though I didn’t write anything about babies, you might laugh so hard that you’ll regret not wearing a diaper while reading.
I had a dream about you. You were writing a book, and I was reading a book. The problem was, it was the same book. So while you were trying to write, I sat next to you yelling at you to write faster because I am a speed reader. Seriously, can you only type 1,000 words per minute? You slowed down my reading so much you made me feel like I had a second-grade reading level. Also, you really should learn how to use a comma. Oh, and one more thing. It’s not a love story if there’s only one character in the book. Not unless I am that character.
Before I’ll take my clone on as a pupil in the craft of writing, he must prove his worthiness. He must write 100 thoughts down, of which 10 might be interesting. If he’s done that, good, then he must write 1,000 thoughts, of which 200 might be interesting. If he’s done that, good, then he must write 10,000 thoughts down, of which 4,000 might be interesting. If he’s done that, good, then he no longer needs me to teach him, because he has taught himself. And since he would be teaching himself, it would prove that I really am the best teacher.
I want to write something that means something to someone...the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is...or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. I want to write beyond the basics and the cliches...I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhale or an inhale...or suffocation.I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard...that is, if I had anything to say.
And now the measure of my song is done: The work has reached its end; the book is mine, None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove, Nor war, nor fire, nor flood, Nor venomous time that eats our lives away. Then let that morning come, as come it will, When this disguise I carry shall be no more, And all the treacherous years of life undone, And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music, The deathless music of the circling stars. As long as Rome is the Eternal City These lines shall echo from the lips of men, As long as poetry speaks truth on earth, That immortality is mine to wear.
Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I’ll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name, perhaps because I’m a regular. Anyways got my shit, left…barely covering the tax. Took the long way home; to get away from that haunting typewriter. Sat down at some park bench, as I started to open my poison; A memory rushed into me. A empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the Christmas tree. I thought my dad would want another drink, so started to pour my bottle into the dirt & cried.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
