A Point of Truth

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape, and size in the world.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.