Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

Thought is action in rehearsal.

Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.

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

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

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.

Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.