You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]

The cool thing about my show and me is that I'm a writer, and I'm a writer first if I don't have music.

To grow old is to lose everything.

Tis immortality to die aspiring, As if a man were taken quick to heaven.

I am passionate about informing the world about our ocean - its complexity and beauty, its value to us, and the perils that it faces.

The kingdoms' people were at the mercy of the natures of those who rose to be their rulers. It was a gamble, and the current generation did not make for a winning hand.

If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times.

Devouring Time and envious Age, all things yield to you; and with lingering death you destroy, step by step, with venomed tooth whatever you attack.

I coach my daughter's softball and basketball team. We go to all the school functions. We go out to eat at night and take the kids to the movies. We try to be as normal as we can.