Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

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.

Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.

Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.

But this bus was a bit too full. The driver only appeared to control the glass and metal around him. In reality, he was at the nose of a travelling paroxysm.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!

if you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.

If someone wants to give you, like, $100 million, it's hard to say no. But I don't want to accept that kind of money right now. I'd feel burdened by it.

You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?