Janet Reid is a literary agent and she has a blog. It seems that many publishers, traditional as well as publish-on-demand, are Read More...
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
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.
Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
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.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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.
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.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

























