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Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.


























