Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.