IF you are not making mistakes, then you are not doing anything.
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. . . . the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
We can't say whether Tehran is supporting Al Qaeda, but we do know that al-Qaida people come here from Pakistan through Iran.
The more you defend in the face of a critical audience, the more you polarize.
I started life washing cars in Canada before moving on to selling life insurance and vacuum cleaners. Later, I went through a programme by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, which literally changed my life. It was the turning point.
I think I'm funny because my family, my siblings were funny.