"Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality."
"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself."
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Source: John Gardner, Stewart O'Nan (1994). “On writers and writing”, Addison-Wesley Longman
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"Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see."
"We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images."
"i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink."
"What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience."
"The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can."