It’s a page on this website, located here. I’ve been collecting informative and witty comments from writers for years. Read More...
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.
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
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.
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.
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.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.

























