Love allows us to remember the joy, and forget the pain. That’s why I write things down, to help me remember.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Every secret of a writer s soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works

the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Foreve