On Writing Quotes

“"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing"”

“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

“I was born in 1947 and we didn't get our first television until 1958.”

“I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too.”

“For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.”

“Four stories. A quarter apiece. That was the first buck I made in this business.”

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.”

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

“In my character, a kind of wildness and a deep conservatism are wound together like hair in a braid.”

“We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room....except we are together. We're close.”

“Don't bother trying to read between the lines, and don't look for a through-line. There are no lines--only snapshots, most out of focus.”

“When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”

“...reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.”

“Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about teenage gangs on the prowl, movies about losers on motorcycles--this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten.”

“Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.”

“I never got to like Carrie White and I never trusted Sue Snell's motives in sending her boyfriend to the prom with her, but I did have something there. Like a whole career.”

“I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism.”

“My mother knew I wanted to be a writer (with all those rejection slips hanging from the spike on my bedroom wall, how could she not?), but she encouraged me to get a teacher’s credential “so you’ll have something to fall back on.”