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I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.