“At Vogue, [Joan] learned the tight, functional economy of public prose. Her editor, Allene Talmey, would assign her to write a story in three hundred words, then, when she was finished, tell her to pare it down to fifty. 'We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write'”

“To get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another. To be a writer, you must write.”