As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Well, I'm like a drug addict, I'm always saying I'm going to stop, and then I don't, what I've said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.
Sometimes you get what you want, but mostly you get what you get.
When it was done and I went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something...
There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.
The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were In your head to n...
The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was whi...
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story
Silent white light filled the world. And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.
Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they’re always a...
Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm.Sorry, clumsy, she says.You always were, Sadi...
Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Laughter, Susannah would later reflect, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the are funny but because your own is fu...
It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.
It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper da...
I know I can do it, Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.