It’s a page on this website, located here. I’ve been collecting informative and witty comments from writers for years. Read More...
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.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.
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 do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
























