“I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

“And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it....It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.”

“I've always been able to say what I meant! It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can't I saw what it feels like?”

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

“Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.”

“Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself.”