1. Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
2.Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
3. I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
4. Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
5. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
6. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
7. You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
8. Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
9. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
10. You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.