If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

Have faith. May you surround yourself with parents, editors, mates and children as tolerant and supportive as mine have been. But the essential support and encouragement of course comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is the genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality.

Painting and potting are crafts. Writing is an addiction.

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for posterity.

It's not a college degree that makes a writer. The great thing is to have a story to tell.

A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God.

A writer is a person who can't resist raping an innocent piece of paper.