Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.