I do first draft in longhand, which saves a lot of rewriting. I try to get a certain amount done each day. Don't always, but I try. Then I clean up in the rewrites.

...Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?" "I hope there's gray...Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

A horsefly can't do a horse much real damage, but it can drive it wild anyhow.

You can write better about a place you've seen for yourself. You don't have to have been there - I've sure written about places I've never seen - but it does help.

Many things are possible. Few things are certain.

I learned by reading an awful lot and by writing a half a million words of stuff nobody would do anything with except wrap old fish.

I'm a social caterpillar. I am not a social butterfly

People you don't like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose.

You count snouts,” Straha said. “Whichever side can persuade most snouts to join it prevails. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to be wise. It only needs to be popular.

People were as they were, not not as he wished them to be.

It takes lot of practice to get it right.

If I don't work for a while, I don't work for a while.

All ethical people strive to choose "right" over "easy" when confronted by situations that force them to choose one or the other.

I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists.

Mother was a great force in her area of evangelism.

Why, a spirit is such a little, little thing, that I have heard man, who was a great scholar, say that he'll dance ye a hornpipe upon the point of a needle.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: you are all stardust.

My parents treat me like I'm 14. They make me clean my room and stuff like that. They're always like "I don't care what MTV says you are.".

Beauty holds more worth than gold.

A picture of Christ was hung in the back of a pulpit. When the minister rose to speak one Sunday morning, a little boy asked his mother, 'Mother, who is that man who stands so we can't see Jesus?'