I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

Pray for rain while digging a well.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.