What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

I am not a consecutive writer.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

When asked, ‚How do you write?‘ I invariably answer, ‚one word at a time.‘

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

I see fighters make funny videos about me and stick them on Facebook and get 20 likes. When I make a video, I sell it to Fox and make seven figures. That’s the difference.

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

I’m a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it’s a process I’ve been doing since I was younger.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

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.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

I write all my sermons.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That’s what I’ve done.

The future of American film lies on television.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.