Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.

Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside.

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.