Wit & Attitude Quote by Jonathan Carroll

Carroll’s line isn’t the cozy “write what you know” bumper sticker; it’s a dare with teeth. “What bites you” frames experience as something invasive and urgent, not neatly owned. The best material isn’t the stuff you can calmly summarize at a dinner party, it’s the nagging wound, the obsession, the shame spiral, the recurring dream that won’t stop re-running. He’s talking about compulsion as a creative compass: if it doesn’t have fangs in you, it probably won’t have any in the reader.

The profanity matters. “Damn the rest” is a refusal of the entire committee that shadows writers: imagined critics, market logic, workshop etiquette, the internal hall monitor that polices tone and taste. Carroll’s intent is less about craft purity than permission to prioritize intensity over approval. It’s a blunt strategy for getting past self-censorship: if you aim at what hurts or haunts, you bypass the safe, performative persona and hit the raw circuitry that makes a story feel lived-in.

Contextually, the line fits a writer whose fiction often smuggles the surreal into the everyday, where emotional truth outranks literal realism. “Bites” also hints at genre’s animal energy: horror, fantasy, and the uncanny thrive on pressure points. Carroll is telling you to follow the disturbance, not the trendline. Write from the site of contact, where the world draws blood, and let everyone else’s expectations bleed out on the floor.