He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

People always see me writing and ask me if they can read my writing. The answer is yes, after I publish it and they pay for it.

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.