@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.

Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

The job of the writer isn't to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

I’ve been writing for about eleven years. I went from elfish to elephantish, and in another eleven years I hope to be Levin.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

When you write, you are telling a story...to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself...over and over again.

I’m an open book—an open book I’m still writing and editing. My book is a romance novel, sort of like The Secret.

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

I meant to spend the day writing, but instead I spent the afternoon cleaning out my belly button. Historians will thank me one day.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.