Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

Genocide is like a dessert. It is made of the flesh and bones of woman and children, it is sweetened with the blood of the innocent, and it is baked in the ovens of Auschwitz. There were truths to be learnt and there was wisdom to be gained... but there was a price to to be paid as well. You could not brush up against the future and escape unscathed. You could not see into the forbidden and avoid damage to your sight.

You shouldn't believe everything you hear you're young, not stupid.

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.