Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

Jesus also function on the earth through the power of light. Light, illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding, wisdom. That is their real power on earth.

Unfortunately...I missed out on the California Gold Rush a century before...I'll be dammed if I miss out on this one.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

Today exists between yesterday and tomorrow.

Is typecasting really a problem?

We must always be aware of the fact that the body, soul and mind are to be trained simultaneously, for otherwise it would be impossible to gain and maintain the magic equipoise.

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

A country of victims is also a country of heroes, risking their lives so others will live. This is the Philippines, the country we love.