Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. Michael Chabon
About This Quote

A writer who tells the truth and submits it to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it is writing pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. This quote reminds me of how important it is for writers to not let people censor their work.

Source: Maps And Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands

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  5. I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a...
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