"When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest."
"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."
"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."
"Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings."
"To write is human, to edit is divine."
"I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."