Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.
Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

























