It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

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.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

I think what you do is, you keep your sensors open. And it's - the more that you do the job, the more you come to understand in a kind of intuitive way that you're always - you know, your radar is on. And the thing is going around and around and around. And it's not picking up any blips.

I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.