不是
Writing is about making something, not about expressing yourself.
"Identity is not fixed; it is fluid and constantly evolving."
"The poem is not a closed field, but an open one."
I am not a storyteller, but a story-maker.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
It’s not about being able to do something, it’s about being able to do it well.
I'm not a poet. I'm a trapeze artist.
I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman.
I'm not a preacher and I'm not a teacher. I'm just a singer.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each as it comes, and I leave it as it goes.
"Memory is a strange thing, it doesn't work like I thought it did. We are so used to thinking of it as a camera or a tape recorder, but it's not like that at all. It's more like a painter, who adds and subtracts elements according to his own rules."
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what others want us to be.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest.
True courage is not the absence of fear, but moving forward in the face of fear.
True freedom is not about doing what you want, but about not doing what you don't want to do.
"A writer is essentially a person who writes not because he has to, but because he cannot not write."