the impulse to make something out of nothing

“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."

[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]”
― T.C. Boyle

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”
― T.C. Boyle 

“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life."

(Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)”
― T.C. Boyle

“First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.”
― T.C. Boyle

“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.”
― T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth