If you are going to learn from other writers don’t only read the great ones, because if you do that you’ll get so filled with despair and the fear that you’ll never be able to do anywhere near as well as they did that you’ll stop writing. I recommend that you read a lot of bad stuff, too. It’s very encouraging. “Hey, I can do so much better than this.” Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging.

I didn’t need, or even want, to be with the best-looking man in the room, but the one who inevitably got my attention was the one whose eyes held a glint of something magnetic - humor, mischief, curiosity, a sense of adventure.