All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. If a novel isn't alive in the writer's mind, then it's as dead as year-old horseshit, even if words continue to march across the page. Everybody has their off-days. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
I am desperately afraid I will die before I've written all the stories I have in me. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.