We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.

I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate.

I learned to love stories by listening to them.