the first time you are reconciled to the terrible unfairness of disappointment, you are getting old.

Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.

Recorded history is wrong. It’s wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

Having watched herself in the speckled mirror ... she was already shocked beyond surprise at what the flat hand of age could do.

[The inspiration that comes to authors of fiction] is not an act of intelligence.

The best way to effectively use time is to schedule it.

Sometimes you meet people who teach you what kind of person you do not want to be in your life.

Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.

I don't feel any sense of competition at all, and that might be my naïveté, but I don't feel pitted against anyone at all.

I love to read, and I don't believe that you have to finish one book before you start another. --Mallory Pike

A gentleman is one who doesn't and can't forgive himself for self-committed mistake even if others forget it and the self-criticism is a mark of his right attitude towards life.

I still believe that something is right only when it feels right.

Kids on a team are like flowers in a bouquet, there is always one that wants to face a different way than the arranger desires.

I think the shocking thing to discover is the owls are not stupid and very feral, very hard to train.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.