On writing

  

“The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.”— John Steinbeck

 “If you focus on results and finding shortcuts, you’ll get impatient. If you focus on the process and doing the right thing, you’ll be unstoppable.”— Maxime LagacĂ©

 “Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.”— Truman Capote

 

 “The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn’t mean you can’t exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.”— Erica Jong

  “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean 'very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”

— C. S. Lewis

 

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

— Kurt Vonnegut