I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.
I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.
I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.
I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.
So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.
You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.
Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.
My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.
I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.
I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.
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