If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
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.
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.
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.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
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.

























