“What do you read?I read what friends tell me is good. This explains the book's success, partially. It got very good reviews. Good reviews will get you a readership right away, but that's it. The review or the article appears one day in a magazine or a newspaper, then it's gone. Word of mouth is a continuing phenomenon, much more powerful.”

“I love to read, but I'm not a reviewer. I'll leave the reviewing to someone else. Suffice it to say, if I'm reading your book, I'm loving it.”

“This town is like Gone with the Wind on mescaline!" From Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

“Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.”

“Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews.”

“Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”

“If I stop to think about fans, or bestselling, or not bestselling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.”