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...
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.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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.
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.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
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.
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 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.

























