The fiction writer, at least, creates the lie to contain the truth.
I started writing because I was tired of considering my own reality. Anyone should be able to write about anything they want, regardless of where they’ve been or where they are now.
This is hardly a tragedy, I realize, and hardly original, but until Hollywood kicked me hard in the nuts I’d always thought that I would succeed massively at whatever I tried.
The business of writing is contingent on the tastes and judgment of others. Editors, critics, Oprah. Again, we adapt to tune it all out.
When you get right down to it, is that I have an overactive dreamlife, and instead of letting it stunt my emotional growth, alienate others, and compromise my sanity, I write.
A writer’s life is full of moments when you feel you’re starting from absolute scratch.
Writing is always partly artifice, a lie — a selection and arrangement of some things, the omission of others. Truth, in a straightforward sense anyway, can be beside the point.
Good work materializes under all economic conditions, so you might as well be wealthy.
The world owes me nothing. The world is indifferent to me, it feels nothing for me. I am merely attempting to secure some sort of foothold on the sheer cliff face up to its sumptuous plateaus.
Need is essential to be a writer.