The first draft of a book – even a long one – should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.
Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.
Small towns harbor small imaginations.
A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.
Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.
Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as unique as a fingerprint.
When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.
A coward judges all he sees by what he is.
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we’ll all need hooves. It’s going to happen sooner or later, isn’t it? You know it is.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.
He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.