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.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.

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

All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.