When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.