I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

There is nothing more precious than the wealth of time.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

May you make time to relax and be refreshed.

Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality.

Your life is influenced by the energy you bring to every moment.

I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.

I like well to be in the company of explorers

I linger on the flathouse roof, the moonlight is divine. But my heart is all aflutter like the washing on the line.

Why can't you place a blessing like that on us?" I asked. "It only works on wild animals." "So it would only affect Percy," Annabeth reasoned. "Hey!" I protested.

Don't just play your way around the course. Think your way around way around the course.