The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

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.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I'm playing.

One is happy to report that Israel Shenker is still at the aerosol stage. His energy is still compressed. The result distinguishes him both as a Jew and as an observer of Jews.

Freddie Green has been my right arm for thirty years. And if he leaves the band one day, I'll probably leave with him.

The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table. Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.

Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.

True singing is a different breath, about nothing.