our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.

Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.

How we learn is what we learn.

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

I am the instigator of my adversities but at the same time I am the architect of my success.

A goal is a planned event

pain can work form the outside in.

I need freedom to be happy.

What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.

At my sexiest, I look like an androgenous Muppet.

You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.

I'm a decent man who exports flowers.

There was a fence and there was this other van- So I go, 'Fence or van? Cause I'm crashing into one of them,' and I said 'Fence,' so I hit the fence and bounced into the van