“Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.”— James Lee Burke Related Quotes “Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting.”— Robin D. Laws “Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they’re leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth’s characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”— T.C. Boyle “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”— John Steinbeck