"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones."

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words make them seem smaller than they were when they were in your head. …"

"He leaned forward, like an English butler taking a bow and threw up on his shoes."

"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life."