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...
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

























