If you love a waist, you waste a love.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.

The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.