Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

To improve as a player you need to not only know how you plan to win, but ... how might your opponent disrupt your plan.

I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge – everything that ever happened is still here.