You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.

Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most relentless force of all, which is time.

If wishes were filet mignon, we'd always eat well at dinner

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.

In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary.

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.