I had no idea that Barack Obama curses before public speaking. I think I know at whom he curses before going on stage. I was as shocked Read More...
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
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.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
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.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
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.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

























