Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

If you hate something, the best way to beat it is to be better than anyone else in it.

I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do no be too eager to deal out death in judgment.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land again after a cheerful careless voyage.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone, I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.

We've never had a female President in this country, which I find stunning

Sadness puts my heart in a prison.