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.
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.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
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.
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.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

























