Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.
One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.
But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
