I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.