What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

One place understood helps us understand all places better

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.