Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.