I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.
Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
I don’t spend the day writing. I’ll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I’ll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.
And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.
God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn’t that funny?
To write is human, to edit is divine.
I have two amazing things in my life: I’m pain-free and I’m debt-free.
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.
Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they’re good, that’s terrific. If they’re not, they’re not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.
We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
Be true, be brave, stand All the rest is darkness.
I’m seen as somebody who writes for adults because I’m an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don’t.
We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.
A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.