The Muse must have a shape. You will write a thousand words a day for ten or twenty years in order to try to give it shape, to learn enough about grammar and story construction so that these become part of the Subconscious, without restraining…
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and is deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary…
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may…
Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart. They will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will…
Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years. The long poem, John Berryman said, takes between five and ten years…Flaubert wrote steadily, with only the usual appalling strains. For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years…On plenty…
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers…
Michael Herr died last June 23, 2016, a sad day. Herr’s book “Dispatches” was the only true news from the war I remember. I was subject to the draft during the War, fought not in Vietnam but in the streets of the United States, and…
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…Do you like sentences?” The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years…
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never be really understood…
The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness. Cezanne