Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
I don’t really plan. I’m almost intuitive about things.
I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
You can’t die with an unfinished book.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‘adult’ DW.
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
I like being a writer.
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it’s usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.
It’s not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it’s American editors.
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn’t want to marry you.
Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything’s changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you’re going to live another few hours.
The thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.