So you need to deliver a speech, let’s say 20 minutes long, to salespeople. You’ve got a new product ready to push out to Read More...
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.
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 most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

























