Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that’s more than just entertainment-w hich is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.

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.

All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.

Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts".

I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.