I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

People who are hypocritical pretenders traitors, liars and fakers Will cause meaningful relationships to become meaningless

The greatest legacy a father can leave for his children before he departs is PEACE, otherwise his properties will go in PIECES sooner that he dies.

Don’t be afraid. Be the kind of person your mother warned you about.

I know too much and not enough

To be honest, I think that I am a bit of a singer, coming from Wales; being Welsh, we are all very proud of our singing heritage.

People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.

The spinning wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery. My head daily bows in reverence to its unknown inventor.

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

One must steer, not talk.

I am she, O most bucolical juvenal, under whose charge are placed the milky mothers of the herd.