Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre you get them one of her books.
Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
When I was a teacher teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.
In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.
Study how water flows in a valley stream smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains rivers plants and trees - should be your teacher.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.
Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.
It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.
The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.