I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer.
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.
I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
There’s no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?
I love Canada. It’s a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.
Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.