No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
or simply:
