“All fiction is to some degree contrived. If it is not contrived, then it actually happened, therefore making it a stolen idea. Ideas and concepts in this world, in our lives, and in our imagination are much more finite than any of us would care to believe.”

“We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.”

“If we could renounce our artful contrivances and discard our (scheming for) gain, there would be no thieves nor robbers.”

“My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.”

“There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.”

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”