You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.