Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

The military preferred - invariably - those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.