Knowing that we'd meet Ruby at the point where she stopped believing, I knew I was also going to have to deal with what you do with your capacity for belief if you don't have an object for your belief.

Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.

A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.

I believe in art, and more fundamentally the freedom to express one's self creatively. People don't know yet what they'll ultimately believe in or how they'll organize their lives. They're kind of in limbo.

Knowing that we'd meet Ruby at the point where she stopped believing, I knew I was also going to have to deal with what you do with your capacity for belief if you don't have an object for your belief.

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity.

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story.