“The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.”

“The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”

“The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.”

“On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.”

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”