Comparison often comes disguised as something practical like how another person promoted him or herself or built their platform. It’s a rouse.
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The difference between what you believed once and what you know now is comedy.
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If given a choice between a trip to Grand Central Station or a great conversation in my hotel lobby, I’ll take the conversation every time.
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We cannot share what we do not already have, and once given we are always left with more of what we offered another.
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I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to quit thinking I need to predict the future.
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What a strange and helpful little voice. No one else could hear it, nor could they see its source, yet it was often all that sustained me when all I could perceive was a wasteland of rejection.
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Certainty is not the same as knowing the way. My page is just as blank and the path is just as obscured now as it was when I was a younger writer.
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It is important as a writer to remember that out there in the reading wilderness are strangers looking for what you have written.
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I try write about sex as if the reader has never had sex, or going for a walk as if the reader has never gone for a walk.
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There is very little as intimate as the relationship between writer and reader. The reader allows the writer into their very mind, and once together they head off on a journey unique to that reading.
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There is nothing like the freedom of discovering you are safe to say what you most want to say. How friendly the world becomes in that holy instant.
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Every single wave had its own touch of that, a drive that could kill or carry you. That was what made them worth riding, though you couldn’t think about dying if you wanted to go back out.
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The problem with goals is that they exist entirely in the future, and no matter how dearly I would like to see those goals realized I always live in the present.
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Here’s why I was glad I went to my first writer’s conference: I learned that professional writers, agents, and editors were real people.
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What I had called imagination was really love, and I can never be more confident than when I am focused on what I love.
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As soon as the alarm went off, and my eyes opened, and my mind oriented to the room and the morning and my wife beside me, my first thought was a list of everything I would do that day. I was like a soldier who’d heard revelry and had to be out of his bunk and in formation by 0600.
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I never want to suffer a moment in my life. I never want to be late, or bored, or angry, or tired, or scared, or depressed, but I do love to tell stories, and I wonder sometimes if I keep throwing myself into the occasional fit of worry or outrage just so I’ll have new material.
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I can’t remember the last time someone asked me what I did. I suspect this is because I began to make peace with the unexplainable, unconditional contentment – began, in fact, to write from it, rather than hoping writing would bring me to it.
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The only time I don’t complain at all is when I’m writing. I simply can’t write and complain. Writing is about what I want on the page, not what I don’t want on the page.
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It is always easier to feel love when you’re with someone, or doing something, or appreciating something, but to really understand love you have to be alone and doing nothing. That’s why the blank page continues to teach me so much about what it means to be human.
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