There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

Little children are all writers.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

Magic. It can get a guy killed.

We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.

Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does pay for therapy.

Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

Carlos Tevez is so rich that when he retires he'll never have to play football again

The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.

All I know is politics. Really, politics takes up most of my time; it's nonstop.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.