authors

Jack Kerouac died after throwing up blood. The malt liquor. Then that other guy who shot his wife in the head. Burroughs somebody. And I wonder about literary figures. They're all drunk and staggering and haunting people today, I bet, still muttering and ranting in disassociated lines.Or, I'm wondering about a middle ground with wooly blankets and nubbly cardigans and nobody shot in the head. Where yes, you are uniquely mad. But functionally uniquely mad. Endlessly absorbed but in the mildly scattered kind of way instead of in the crap-I-shot-my-wife-in-the-head kind of way. Unable to dedicate to another human being only in occasional fits.Roald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom but then I'm not so sure about that. He bought a wagon from a Romanian gypsy and his kids played in it and I think he had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if he reached a point where his own point no longer applied to him. He had no master except his own soul, and that, he was sure, was why he did it.

Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something--a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question_-ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness.

I can__ overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I__ thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people _ I didn__ judge! _ but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn__ need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author__ mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time.Bacon is also an acceptable restorative.

Without writers, stories would not be written,Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

You -have- to love your monster.

If you call yourself an "authoress" on your Facebook profile, you suck at life. You are stupid and your children are ugly. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to be cute and original. You're not. You are about as original as all those other witless twits "writing" the one millionth shitty Fifty Shades clone. Or maybe you're trying to show your 2000 fake Facebook "friends" that you are an empowered feminist who will not stand for sexist terminology. But you're not showing people that you are fighting the good fight, you're showing people that you are a sheep, who's trying just a little too hard to ride the current wave of idiotic political correctness. The word "author" is no more gender-discrimination than the word "person." Do you call yourself a personess? No, of course not, because then you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, "Hello, I'm a retard.

I became a feminist upon the realization that, whether physical, mental, or emotional, everything involved in obtaining love and approval from men required some form of self-mutilation.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Grayson: Fiction is just a lie anyway.Brianna: But it's not - it's a different kind of truth - it would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that__ appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them__ven if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist__ couch or even the lovers_ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.