James Baldwin's advice on writing and the creative process:

"If you are going to be a writer, there is nothing I can say to stop you. If you're not going to be a writer, nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real."

"When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."

"I start working when everyone has gone to bed. I've had to do that ever since I was young—I had to wait until the kids were asleep.

And then I was working at various jobs during the day. I've always had to write at night. But now that I'm established, I do it because I'm alone at night."

"Rewriting is very painful. You know it's finished when you can't do anything more to it, though it's never exactly the way you want it... The hardest thing in the world is simplicity.

And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal."

"When you've finished a novel, it means, 'The train stops here; you have to get off here.' You never get the book you wanted; you settle for the book you get. I've always felt that when a book ended, there was something I didn't see, and usually when I remark the discovery it's too late to do anything about it."

"Something that irritates you and won't let you go. That's the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."

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