“Working on a new idea is kind of like getting married. Then a new idea comes along and you think, 'Man, I'd really like to go out with her.' But you can't. At least not until the old idea is finished.”

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“But that's not a very original idea, is it? It's really just a platitude ... sort of like a Florida sunset, Nevertheless, it happens to be the truth, and the truth deserves to be spoken... if you can say it in a new way, I tried to put it in a picture.”

“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

“When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.”

“An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.”

“By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman”