"When you write a story, youre telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. . . . Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers--common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. Ive heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."
"Four stories. A quarter apiece. That was the first buck I made in this business."
"I dont want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldnt just stand around with your hammer in your hand."
"I was born in 1947 and we didnt get our first television until 1958."
"I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too."
"One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: "The editor is always right." The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editors advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine."