Don Roff quotes:

Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.

Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping.

Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

Always work with/surround yourself with people who help make you a better version of you. Kindly avoid those who don't.

Keep being bold on the page, and in life, and people cannot ignore you forever.

Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit.

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

Kindness, motherfucker, kindness.

I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious.

If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life--whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours.

Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

A migraine is the cockblock of writing.

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.

We often wait for that knock of opportunity, though I've found it's better to just grab a chainsaw and cut open your own fucking door.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy.

When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

A writer always writes.

Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

You can be a writer who doesnt read everyday. But youre not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.