Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

Good writing is lean and confident.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.