You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

But the only rhyme he could summon for 'out' was 'sauerkraut,' which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.