The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you.

Fire the doubters out of your life.