All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.
I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.
Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.
I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, do it.
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.
I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.
And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.
Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.
I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don’t do that. I just keep doing different things.
Books were safer than other people anyway.
I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
There may be a parallel between woodcuts and radio; radio plays are a living art form everywhere except the USA.