Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.

They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can't smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.