Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is. "

Related Quotes:

" I don't think you can be taught how to make art. You can be coached, but on a fundamental level you have to figure it out for yourself. You have to learn how your own mind works, figure out your own relationship to the art; you essentially have to invent it completely for yourself. "

" I just assume that I'll fail at something for several years - that I'll try my hardest and still fail for several years. With writing, that turned out to be wrong. I tried my hardest and failed for about fifteen years. "

" My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, 'We trust you, we believe in you.' "

" When you hold things back, when you don't commit completely to your ideas and trust completely in your own instincts, you are guaranteeing your own failure - even if you end up having commercial success. "

" When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans. "

" Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live. "

" When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement. "

" When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus. "

" Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout. "

" There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves. "

" My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that. "

" My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact. "

" I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get. "

" When I finish a book, I get extremely restless; I have to aggressively find ways to occupy myself; going off into the woods alone, doing things that are physically or mentally demanding to keep myself busy until the next big idea comes. "

" Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them. "

" Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book. "

" Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie. "

" You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work. "

" I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding. "

" I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars. "

" At Cornell University, it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years, you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt, and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money. "

" Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing. "

" I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket. "

" At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university. "

" You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I'd listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with. "

Believe In Yourself

" I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre. "

" I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts. "

" If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good? "

" Life throws up enough road blocks to keep you from writing; you can't be adding to them yourself by saying you can only write in one specific place. I'm in New York half the time and Texas half the time, and I work wherever - in my computer bag I have some foam ear plugs that I can put in. "

" Whenever I'm interested in something, I make sure I'm really good at it. "