Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

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.

Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.