Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

What we fear we often rage against.

Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

My marriage is on the rocks again, yeah, my wife just broke up with her boyfriend.

Young people believe that regret is something you will never feel if you simply do as you please, but sometimes it is a matter of degree.

Everyone who doesn't want to believe in supernormal powers says the people who experience them are psycho. What the hell kind of a world is this if all magic moments are psychotic?

The music I actually listen to sounds nothing like my own!

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

The man who acts humble in order to win praise is guilty of the lowest form of pride.

I love funny people. I met and became friends with some of the funniest people ever. Gilda Radner, bless her soul; Martin Short; Dave Thomas; Eugene Levy.

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.

Make your life spectacular, I know I did.