You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.