Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses.

...[Y]ou have an inner strength that makes it possible for you to do things other people couldn't even begin to think of doing.

I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

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.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

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.

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.