Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Less is more.

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.