Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing

Therefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.

Rule No. 6: What isn’t said is as important as what is said.

Rule No. 7: Writer’s block is a tool—use it.

Rule No. 11: There are no rules.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

Italo Calvino once remarked, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Rule No. 10: Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story,