I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.