Let’s resolve a headache, the one that has plagued writers since…well, the plague. It is: when to use “affect” versus “effect.” Read More...
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What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
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.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
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.
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.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.


























