You Need The Art In Order To

When I First Wanted To Be A Writer, I Learned To Write Prose By Reading Poetry.

Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

If You Write Every Day, You're Going To Write A Lot Of Things That Aren't Terribly Good, But You're Going To Have Given Things A Chance To Have Their Moments Of Sprouting.

You Almost Believe That You Will Never Come To The End Of A Roll Of Tape; And When You Do, There Is A Feeling, Nearly, Though Very Briefly, Of Shock And Grief.