What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.

There are two wrong reactions to a rejection slip: deciding it's a final judgment on your story and/or talent, and deciding it's no judgment on your story and/or talent.

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

Religious reverence for one's own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff.

That the majority of people do not embrace salvation in this life does not mean that their experiences now do not lay a foundation for a later acceptance of it.

We live in this universe not with the power of our body, but with the power of our will and spirit.

Stop rushing. Slow down and enjoy the beauty of life.

I could feel their grief as if it were a beast holding us down.

What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.

To talk about realizing the Self is discontinuous because there is nothing to realize but the Self. There is nothing but realization.

Sleep away the years, sleep away the pain, wake tomorrow - a girl again.

Professionalism is nothing but a crude insistance on the mechanization of mankind.

Take a look at me now, cause there's just an empty space. And you coming back to me is against all odds and that's what I've got to face.

Morals and lights are our first necessities.