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

...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 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.

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.

Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.

Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

If you're frightened, you're out of luck.

We are still focussing too much on gender. If we all just gave ourselves a break, knowing that we could all be everything, we'd feel relieved and more equal.

Progressive Conservative candidates from Quebec want to exert real power in Ottawa, not simply be content with playing a secondary role.

We are a studying nation. Scholarship from science is important to the whole world and those people need to be able to be safe and secure in what they do.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Each marriage starts with two built-in handicaps. It involves two imperfect people.

Happen to things, don't let things happen to you

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.