There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.

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.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

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

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.