There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can't smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see.

Writing is a communication.

Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.