I don't know but I like it

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, ‘How alive am I willing to be?’

Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.

I have spent a good many years since ― too many, I think ― being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Paradox is beloved of novelists. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.