Write letters to your editors, write to your members of Congress, and write to your news stations.
The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.
You're supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it's an agreeable tiredness.
Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.
I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.
At times. . . one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.
What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its return journey to dust?
People wanted to be friends with me for not the right reasons. They'd introduce me to somebody else as the Olympian or the swimmer. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to blend in.
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
A sensual life is a ghostly existence where you live on the surface and your soul passes through everything, touching nothing.