Destroying art is practice for destroying people.

Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times. Here is the ax.

Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.

I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, to easily changed.

That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.

Waiters and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You reveal a secret only if you are never going back again.