True story. One day a client said that to me. Honestly, I was surprised. It never occurred to me that so many other writers don’t Read More...
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
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.
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.
Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

























