writing

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

There are many excuses not to write. Try using writing as an excuse not to do other things.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and it belongs to you forever:the happiness and unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and weather. If you can give that to reader, then you're a writer

Someone will ask later, sometimes
searching for a name, his own or someone's else's
why I neglected his sadness or his love...

But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone.

Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time
the cold heart of the clocks...

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.