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.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
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.

























