Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

People always ask me about the role models that I'm providing for kids, and I say I can't be concerned with that. I'm not worrying about corrupting youth. I'm worrying about writing realistically and truthfully to affect the reader.

When I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.

I don't like to think in terms of writing ten or twelve pages a day. Usually I'm writing a scene, and it's always with the idea, "I wonder what is going to happen." Or sometimes I write about something that affected me emotionally the day before and that I don't want to lose. I'm very unorganized at first; but finally it comes into a structure where consciously I'm working on a novel per se.

A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.