I'm not a good actor, I can play myself and a much gayer version of myself. That's my range.
Writing shouldn't come between the reader and what's being described. It should be as transparent as possible.
You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.
The extension of power offered by a pony, the ease and speed of movement, the tapping of unsuspected courage, the satisfaction of collaboration with another creature and of controlling it in order to improve the collaboration, the joy of fussing over it - of loving it - these, from the age of about eight to sixteen were the most completely realised delights of my life.
An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.
Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.
If you are a New York comedian who knows how to improvise and has glasses, you're going to start getting commercials.
Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
I pray thee cease thy counsel, Which falls into mine ears as profitless as water in a sieve.