“Even in stories written by exceptional writers, even when they write a well-crafted piece…the mother is a cliché, though it might be a good rendering of a cliché.”

“After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.”

“It's a cliché - but true - that life is not a dress rehearsal. You get to do it once, so do it well.”

“Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse.”

“I've come to understand that the Bible was a great story well crafted, written and promoted to change human beings -Edy kasawuli”

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”

“Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”

“There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.”

“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.”