You mistake patience for forbearance.

Cersei Lannister: I shall wear this as a badge of honor. Robert Barathon: Wear it in silence or I'll honor you again.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

The girl had hoped for fog, but the gods ignored her prayers as gods so often did.

I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.

That was the way of this cold world, where men fished the sea and dug in the ground and died, whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain.