A true artist is driven by the never-ending desire to create.
Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
And I' declared the Sawhorse, filling an awkward pause, 'am only remarkable because I can't help it.
When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.
I have no problem with the idea of comfort, but it is not an important thing aesthetically. If you look at a shoe and immediately say it looks very comfortable, in terms of design, it is not going to excite me. Of course, I am not putting nails in my shoes to ensure everybody is in pain, but a heel is not a pair of slippers and never will be.
You can now share your story anonymously much more easily than you could earlier and you can watch people have conversations about it. And when people come out and say negative things about you, there will be other people who have had similar experiences or who know people who have had similar experiences who will defend you.