"I always distrust overly specific writing advice.  I don't agree with it, necessarily.  When you're thinking about what to write or how to write something, it's too easy to make a lot of arbitrary rules for yourself.  I think the difficult thing with learning how to write is not learning the style or rules, but figuring out what story you want to tell."

"I don't really believe in that whole 'wait for the muse to strike' thing.  I'm more of a 'sit your ass in a chair and start typing' guy."

"Just unclench, live your life and spend less time berating yourself.  Anxiety and stress are the enemies of creativity."

"You'd have to be a literary critic or a psychiatrist to pick the writer out of his work.  Every fictional story goes through this sort of blender process where you take some real experience... you know what's real or true when you put it into the blender with fiction, and then it gets all mixed up with something that didn't really happen, but there's still a little of you in there.  I think the writer is in there no matter what you do. You can't really remove yourself from it."

"It's something you have to learn, how to tell the right stories for you, and it's this completely ineffable thing."

"People treat writer's block like it's this kind of mythical, mystical ailment.  It's actually a very specific problem, and that is that something is wrong with your story, or wrong with your scene, and you're tying to do something that is not motivated by your characters.  If your writer's block is so complete that you don't even know where to start, it's probably that you're not spending enough time at the keyboard.  It's all part of the process."