Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as the keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance--that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be--curiosity--to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
Quote of the Day: William Faulkner
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.