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...
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
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.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
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.
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.
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.

























