Mike's Writing Workshop & Newsletter

“Day by day, you have to give the work before you
all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects, If you give freely, there will always be more.”—Anne Lamott

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals. Ideas are everywhere.”—Sue Grafton

“Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame.”—Leonard Bishop

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who kept on trying when there seemed no hope at all.”—Dale Carnegie

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”—Anais Nin

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”—Virginia Woolf

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”—Carl Sandburg

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”—President Theodore Roosevelt

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”— Tom Clancy