Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel.

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.