I’m envious of this fellow’s literary output. Chet Cunningham died March 14th, 2017, at age 88. He wrote — and this Read More...
Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
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.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
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.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
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.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
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.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.

























