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

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

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.

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