When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names. The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.