Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Your success as a writer will probably not depend on how well you write so much as in how you handle rejections.
If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.
Funny thing, every time an angel appeared to someone in the Bible, the first thing he'd say was, "Fear not."... I guess they were pretty spectacular.
You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.
Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.
When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?' Well, I answer, 'How do you not think of it?' I see a gum wrapper on the ground, and I think, 'Oh, a Russian spy probably dropped that.' I just think like that, and those thoughts go through my mind constantly.