And It May Be That Love Sometimes

I Would Rather Be Dead Than Not Read

What I Find To Be Very Bad Advice Is The Snappy Little Sentence, 'write What You Know.' It Is The Most Tiresome And Stupid Advice That Could Possibly Be Given. If We Write Simply About What We Know We Never Grow. We Don't Develop Any Facility For Languages, Or An Interest In Others, Or A Desire To Travel And Explore And Face Experience Head-on. We Just Coil Tighter And Tighter Into Our Boring Little Selves. What One Should Write About Is What Interests One.

You Should Write Because You Love The Shape Of Stories And Sentences And The Creation Of Different Words On A Page. Writing Comes From Reading, And Reading Is The Finest Teacher Of How To Write.

He Pressed His Face Into The Fabric And Breathed In Slowly Through His Mouth And Nose, Hoping For The Faintest Smoke And Mountain Sage And Salty Sweet Stink Of Jack But There Was No Real Scent, Only The Memory Of It, The Imagined Power Of Brokeback Mountain Of Which Nothing Was Left But What He Held In His Hands.

In A Rough Way The Short Story Writer Is To The Novelist As A Cabinetmaker Is To A House Carpenter.