[I]t’s the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn’t know the difference.
But editors are still the world’s readers. And thus the eyes of the world.
I hadn’t been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.
I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.
Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.
…but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.