Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
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.
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.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.

























