The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.