When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.
When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.
We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.
As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.
Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.
Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.
A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
