I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration. (from the introduction to the story collection Future on Fire, where he discusses writers he considers to be hacks.)

Tell the story plainly and clearly.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is? (Ibid.)

You need to remember that what you're dealing with here is the ideas I had when I was 16 that I'm putting in my fiction now.

Perry Mason: Maybe my writers are better than yours.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the…

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.