Editors are licensed to be curious.

A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.

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

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

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.

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.