To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.