You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.