Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?

I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer.

...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.