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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.
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.
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
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 get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
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.
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.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

























