A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.

poetry is where the language is renewed.