I'm not talented or gifted. I'm a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.

The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.

And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!