I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

What writers do - everything comes from inside, from experiences of the world that we have digested. And then we turn it into silk, or stories.

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

The appeal of writing a romance was that I'd never written one before the The Thorn and The Blossom.

I loved writing something I'd never written before, and I wanted to write not just about "true love" but also a human relationship.

I actually pushed the boundaries on how long a book like this [The Thorn and the Blossom] can be. The original plan called for two 7,500 word stories, and I turned in two 10,000 word stories.

I've heard some readers saying they wished the story was longer, and I completely understand that desire - we all like to sink into a nice, long novel.

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

The problems are here to stay. We need to find a way to deal with them.

People who are indifferent about the happenings around them are human biomasses.

When we are very young, our parents inadvertently program us to be what we eventually become. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life. You have to find the lemonade. You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life.

If oil exploration can threaten a place as beautiful and meaningful as Virunga, where next?

Rock and roll seems to have had a mellowing in the business where it got harder to sell individual records and make money doing that.

I love helping people; just being of service makes me happy!

I realized that my friends in the ashram needed to be celibate because, for them, sexuality was a very tacky issue.

Money equals business which equals power, all of which come from character and trust.

If there was a story about boys playing punk I don't think I would've made it, because it would just be the same, it wouldn't be interesting enough.