For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.

Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.