“Professional writers write to fit”

“You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write”

“We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised.”

“As the hero learns, readers learn too.”

“Whatever beginning goals you set for yourself, following through on them will build momentum and a sense of achievement and those small success will point the way to bigger ones”

“...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”

“It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will...”