As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

I can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.

Pain is all I know." He murmured. "Peace is all I want

Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.

As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it very loose, the line of the law so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.