reading is the creative center of a writer's life

I read where I can, but I have a favorite place and probably you do, too—a place where the light is good and the vibe is usually strong. For me it’s the blue chair in my study. For you it might be the couch on the sun porch, the rocker in the kitchen, or maybe it’s propped up in your bed—reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on your sheets.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

If this is a dream, the details are good. It's the absolute truth. They are a novelist's details... but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know?

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

Words have weight.