I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

I'm dense when it comes to discouragement.

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.

During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.

There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

College isn't half as much fun as they told us it was going to be.""It's not one-hundredth as much fun.

The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months, or even three months.

There's no regrets for me.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

The shortest distance between two idiots is a conga line.

My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.

Keep varying the program. Your body will tell you what to do.

I get atomic, hypo-galactical... Word to mom, I'm in my own world. Galaxy rays? Powerful.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

When love is unkind, it is not love anymore.