The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.

...what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection. BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON Chapter 27 Page 214

I can do what I need to do. I can get where I want to go, no matter how hard it is.

Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun.

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.