The heat of that which has not healed burns so strong it can drive a story on its fire alone.
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Ideas are like invited guests. Who comes depends on the party.
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Friendliness is our natural relationship to one another, what is always present if we stop worrying about whether we’re likable or interesting
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I’ve learned that the difference between the artist and the victim is a single word: Because.
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It’s tempting to think life would be better if this were all that greeted you each morning, but you know the truth.
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As soon as I stop worrying and doubting and controlling and just get out of the way, life happens in the form of a story.
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You write for connection, for the magic of falling into the full alive dream of a story, but also you come to the page for this very emptiness. You come to the page to understand it.
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For a short time in my early twenties I thought I might want to be an actor. I was performing in a show I’d written with my brother, and I became increasingly interested in how you find and then stay in character. Even though it was a sketch comedy show and my characters were mostly clownish versions of myself, there was still a difference between what I inhabited on stage and what I inhabited offstage. I wanted the character to be as real as I was; I didn’t want the audience to ever see me “acting.”
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The first writer I ever heard give a talk was Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove I had devoured in a particularly fallow week while drifting jobless through the suburban wastes of Glendale, CA. I had since moved to Seattle where my then fiancé and I went to see him at the University of Washington. I was twenty-five, and just begun my first novel.
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