There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises, and you might not ever be able to uncompromise yourself. If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do it in a disciplined fashion; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays. You’ll be willing to say no when somebody wants to play games with our work. You’ll be willing to not sell it. You’ll have a very strong sense of your work, your self-development.

What you read when you don’t have to determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.

Writers live twice.

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.