My father has painted every single day of his life—he once covered his father’s car tarp with his rendition of the Last Judgment—and it is this quiet, steady, joyful focus that infuses my habits as a writer. So often people think of “discipline” as a cold, steely business, instead of a habit of calmly wading in and agreeing to get carried out to a deeper place.—Katherine Vaz

I have an affection for a layered sentence and a sentence that has a logical track in it that has some dialectic, where the sentence will go on. It will propose a thesis and then there’ll e antithesis to it, then there’ll be a synthesis, all in one little—or, not little—but all in one grammatical package. I just like doing that, and it keeps me educated.—Bob Shacochis

How to find the way into that situation, how to begin the story—that is the labor. Some emerge from failed beginnings of novels. Some are just written. There are myriad paths to Buddha.—Lynn Freed, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

The more idiosyncratic you are, the more true you are to your own agenda, the better the writing is going to be.—Ron Carlson, interviewed by Susan McInnis

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