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The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is. A hat trick in a medicine show. A fevered dream. A trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent. An itinerant carnival. A migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt it didn't matter.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
You have to believe in the reality of the world and the reality of the people in it.
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
The soul is not a thing you can have. It is a way of being in the world.
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
The best stories are the ones that leave you with more questions than answers.
You have to be willing to be alone to be a writer.
The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.
It's not the writer's job to tell you how to feel. It's the writer's job to tell you something and make you feel it.
The best thing about being a writer is that you get to live in the world you create.
The trick is to pay attention to what's happening around you and to keep writing.
The purpose of fiction is to take you out of your own life and make you aware of other lives.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.
Among thousands of people, you meet those you've met. Through thousands of years, across the boundless wilderness of time, you happen to meet them, neither earlier nor a bit too late. There is nothing to be said except to ask lightly, "Oh, you're here too?"
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your childhood.
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.