Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
To write is human, to edit is divine.
When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.
Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.
You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Nothing will train you better as a writer than working on your next book.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.
There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.