Stephen Karam Quotes

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.

I say it's easier to write for other people than write for myself.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

I don't know about writing. It's quite lonely. You have to have a lot of patience with yourself.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script.

In a series of wonderful essays, Evan Handler gives himself up to us - warts and all. To our amusement and bemusement we share in his emotional growth as he struggles to mature. I not only laughed along with him but felt that I too had grown a little along the way. Who could ask for more?

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

In the writing, I'm just trying to go deeper, emotionally, and learn more about myself and reveal more and find a way to connect with people in new ways.

The thing that bubbles up the most when I'm around other people is that I feel a joy of being alive. But I also am a very sensitive person and have many heavier feelings. It can be tiresome after a while to only do comedy, especially after you grow as a person. It starts to feel like you're playing an older version of yourself.

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.