Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

There’s always someone who knows something.