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Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

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Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.

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It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, wa...more

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If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with th...more

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I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, an...more

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Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through ...more

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He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing...more

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Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.

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The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says i...more

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Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. Fr...more

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I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to ...more

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For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.

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You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on ea...more