If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.