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... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

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He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

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But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

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You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.

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What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief f...more

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Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

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One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashame...more

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The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance ab...more

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Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

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The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

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As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I kne...more

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There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

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It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

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Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

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I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before th...more