Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time.

Pollution in your mind will make your heart BLACK...

Always do the right and be the right, Whatever the circumstances.

And this fine young prince had fallen in love with a Nobody from Nowhere -- as princes sometimes do, though not as often as romantic tradition would have you believe.

I should have shouted "No" and left him. "But at least" said Satan in the deeps of my mind, "know what the temptation is before you do anything hastily.

Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there's a lot of money involved.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

I tend to find characters who lack vulnerability dull.