Let's face it, writing is hell.

I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls