“Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.”

“This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.”

“Character development is vital when writing a strong story. Weak characters make for weak stories.”

“Great characters tell their own stories. The author just writes it down for them.”

“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 start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.”