Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

When a writer's whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.