Thomas McGuane Quotes

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

… most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.

Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

When I lived in China, my works were already being banned, and I couldn't publish. In those days, when I was in China, I was writing for myself, so that's the process of writing for myself that was the most important thing.

Am I really an author if I just put pictures in a book?

I'm deeply stressed as a filmmaker, and I know I'm not alone. The censorship crisis, the moral policing, the politics of it has most of us on edge. I'm scared to use certain words: like, if I use 'Bombay,' will there be a problem?

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

Can't write worrying what the Internet's going to think.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

If there was Twitter when I wrote some of my early stuff, there'd be no 'Matilda.'

I don't like seeing talented storytellers ruled by fear.

Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.

Several times I drew a critical cartoon and then, at the last moment, stopped myself from putting it out in print. I thought it would be misunderstood, be a politically incorrect thing to do.

A writer must experiment with genres. Otherwise, it is a restriction on the craft.

I feel like I try to write from an honest of a place as I can - without scaring people off too much, I guess.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.