“It’s 3:33 am as I’m writing this down on loose sheets of printer paper. I’m in the back office sitting behind the manager’s desk, just enjoying the good life. In essence, this job enables me to be a real writer, because here I am writing, and getting paid to do it.”

“I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I’m shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear. I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.”

“I know I am a writer because until I’m writing I don’t know what I know.”

“Why do we writers write? Is it because we have something to say, or is it because we just do? I write because I can, because I just do, and because I am a writer, and so I write.”

“The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.”

“For me, if I have writer’s block it means I know that what I am writing is not working quite right and I need to go back and fix what is not right. And once I do that I can write onward. Sometimes writer’s block is just I’m in a funk that day and my writing just isn’t working. In that case I write anyway and then throw it away. You can always write. Writer's block is 'I can't write because what I'm writing is crap.”