It was just curiosity. And the top result was for a list of 10 compiled by writer Nicole Bianchi on her website! If you’re a Read More...
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
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.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
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.
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 one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
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.
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.
In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
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.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
























