Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.
Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.
Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.
The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.
Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.
one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.
I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.
