You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

When she cried, he would say, "there is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.

If you are always frightened for yourself you can't act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don't matter all that much.

You can either give in to what youre feeling, just say ‘okay, enough is enough’ and be done with it, or you can fight it.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.