I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

Maybe everyone is just waiting for someone else to save them.

...it’d be like looking for a needle in a burning haystack.' 'Oh, I’ve done that,' Mark said airily. 'It’s a game we used to play, after we got rid of all our livestock and didn’t need our hay no more. You throw a match into the haystack, give the fire a three-second head start, and begin looking. You can find the needle every time if you work quick

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

There's something about each of my books that I'm really proud of, and there's something about each of my books that I cringe over.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

He looked at the piles of food again, and it was like he was seeing it with new eyes. This is wrong, he thought. Letting food rot while people die of hunger. It's evil.