Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.
I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in. . . The edit.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
If you consider sexual desire and romantic love between men and women to be natural and healthy, you are not a feminist. There is nothing natural about sex, according to feminist ideology, no biological urge that causes women to be attracted to men.
Reality is where your consciousness is located
My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.