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...
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.
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 the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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.
I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.
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.
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.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
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.
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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
























