So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and t...
Contrary to popular belief, people always say "It was a pleasure doing business with you". It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is...
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.
Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.
I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought...
think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to f...
Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.
Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.
I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or...
If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.
Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.
Good fiction makes the truth believable.
You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.
You gotta dig through the shit to get to the gold.
Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people jus...
Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty
The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.