And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

There is a myth that homosexuals are 'born that way,' and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.

What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.