Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

Writing starts with living.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

Something is wrong with a sentence when you can delete words and not sense the loss.