That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

The beauty of writing is imagining new endings to a time of darkness, like burning off a morning fog with the heat and clarity of the sun.

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.

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.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.

My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me “a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writersmystics, painters, troubadoursfor they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.