It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.

Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.