if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself.

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Work and imitation go together in the process of learning.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Aldous Huxley’s “The Education of an Amphibian” in his book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out.

Read those authors who write the way you hope to write, those who think the way you would like to think. But also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years.

His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.