When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.

Writing is hard work.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.