Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.

And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.

The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture.

She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.

It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.