I didn’t care…about heroes who could read minds or walk through walls or do magic. The heroes I liked had courage and knew more real stuff than those who opposed them.

I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.

Not much comes easy in this world, Sonny. If it does, it's best to be suspicious of it. It's probably not worth much.

A man can't hit a woman and stay a man. He becomes a loathsome thing, even to himself. But the woman who stays with such a man panders to his darkness. They both risk their souls.

I have never been able to understand anyone on this planet who lacks a need for knowledge. Is it not God's greatest gift to us all, this capacity to think, to wonder, to imagine?

You've got to be a good reader. So whatever genre that you're interested in, read a lot of books about it and it's better than any kind of writing class you'll ever take. You will absorb techniques and then in a lot of cases you can just start writing using the style of the book or the author that you admire and then your own style will emerge out of that. Be a diligent reader and then try to write seriously, professionally and approach everything in writing in a professional way.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.