If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.

A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.