The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.
I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter’s evening. I remember them.
Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you’re waiting for someone to publish the first thing...
Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.
Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?
You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.
Black as night, sweet as sin.
People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.
Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?
I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
And life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.
Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human.
People tend to find books when they are ready for them.