People can be stunningly unobservant.

Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.

He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.

When you start, it's very cold, an impossible task. But then maybe the characters start to take on a little bit of life, or the story takes a turn that you don't expect ... With me that happens a lot because I don't outline, I just have a vague notion. So it's always felt like less of a made thing and more of a found thing. That's exciting. That's a thrill.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.