Everybody loves a thing more if it has cost him trouble.

Ninety-five percent of all writers who write do not get published, but 100 percent of all writers write because they have a voice in their head. The vast majority of writers simply write because they have to.

If all my friends jumped off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them. I'd be at the bottom, hoping to catch them.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain,you must either be a god or a corpse.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be, we learn what to champion and what to avoid.

I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one Im most proud of is the one no one will ever see - the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it.