Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.
You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.
Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.
Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.
Religious reverence for one's own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff.