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.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

























