Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.

Sometimes writing is easy. Other times it’s as hard as trying to eat a whole whale, after the whale has just eaten you.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.