He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

There are things you don't want to know you can do

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.

I just want to be the best Carly Rae I can be.

The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.

Hopefully I'm not a grumpy old guy sitting in the corner, yelling at people and demanding things.

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.

Success doesn't change you... It reveals you

See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.

Get off, you look ugly (to a blood splattered player during a game)

A child gets sick with a chronic disease of unhappiness not from unhappy circumstances but from unhappy people around him. Unhappy people cannot raise happy children; it's impossible.

It is progress when weapons are improved to kill more people at a longer range.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.