With the Internet, the greatest disseminator of bad data and bad information the universe has ever known, it's become impossible to trust any news from any source at all, because it's filtered through this crazy yenta gossip line. It's impossible to know anything.

Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.

Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they're being duplicitous.