writing advice?

1. Do you read writing advice/ how to books? How often? Why or why not?
I don't read books because they're expensive, but I do go searching on the internet for some advice from authors I like or some tips on how to write one scene or another whenever I'm stuck because I start thinking about them and how they could be applied to my situation and that normally gets the words flowing again, although they usually go to another direction entirely and sound too fake, too much like the other author's work, so I try to do it only when I'm in serious need of advice.

2. How useful do you think writing advice books are to writers, in general? To you, specifically? 
I'd say they are useful to writers because coming up with something completely new or figuring out a technique on your own is something extremely different, so the books serve as guidelines, but at the same time they can make a writer stuck if he reads only one technique. It's a double-edged sword. To me, it is a way to help me build a technique of my own and it has helped, but they do not compare to reading and analyzing books that I think are well-written. It's like having somebody fish for you and receive only what that person has caught or having somebody teach it to you and fish something yourself. 

3. Have you learned any exercises from a writing advice book that you'd like to share with us?
Write about what you want, the way you want to and forget about everything else but the writing and what you hope it will become. You shouldn't worry in the beginning, you should just worry at the end, because otherwise you won't have an end to worry about.
I think I got this from different books and different advices, but it really helped me. 

4. What writing advice books do you think we should check out?
I don't read books because they're expensive, but I do suggest the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson as a way to start thinking of a novel and to google different things regarding character voices and narrative styles.

5. If you could write a writing advice book, what wisdom would it contain?
"There's no recipe to writing a book, just like there's no set recipe for pizza. Everyone does it differently, but the guidelines are almost the same and, in the end, you have the pizza, or the book. You can go looking for writing advice, for novel structure advice, for character advice, and you'll find thousands of things that will give you what you're looking for, but those are simply guidelines. What matters is the way you tweak it and how you put your own mark on it to make it a book and not some report or machine-like story." (I don't think this book would sell much, though)