Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

I want a platform that, like a book or a magazine, I can carry into the bath or leave at the beach.

I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.

I was 17 years old when I was killed by a vampire"-Ruby Kennedy from My Handsome Vampire.

A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.

The world loves a spice of wickedness.

I don't think I'm unusual in that, in my 20s, like many people, I felt invincible.

Modesty sets off one newly come to honour.

There the Bush Administration has offered only a merry-go-round policy. They got up on their high horse, whooped and hollered, rode around in circles and ended right back where they'd started.

Imagine people growing hemp and making everything from food to fuel without petroleum!

we love what we love and who we love who we love and why we love why we love and find a falling shoelace knotted and strung between the fingers of strangers

Unless you learn to play a duet in the same key, to the same rhythm, a slow process of disengagement will wedge you apart, first secretly, psychologically, and then openly and miserably.

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.