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Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.
Writing a book just might be the hardest thing I've ever done, besides trying to get laid in college.
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.
What do you have to write about? You're not oppressed! You're not gay!
To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself, to build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer. This is the ultimate breach of Contract.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
The writer merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows the selected locality, and he strusts that he can plunge those people into incidents with interesting results.
The only good writer was a dead writer. Then he couldn't surprise anyone any more, couldn't hurt anyone any more.
The nineteenth century was the era of the novelist.
The twentieth is the era of the journalist.
Somebody asked me, 'Bukowski, if you taught a course in writing what would you ask them to do?' I answered, 'I'd send them all to the racetrack and force them to bet $5 on each race.' This ass thought I was joking. The human race is very good at treachery and cheating and modifying a position. What people who want to be writers need is to be put in an area that they cannot manuever out of by weak and dirty play. This is why groups of people at parties are so disgusting: all their envy and smallness and trickery surfaces. If you want to find out who your friends are you can do two things: invite them to a party or go to jail. You will soon find that you don't have any friends.