I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.

I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And Marion bought "Wound On The Moon" .My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.

In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with - a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

And it is a quiet terrible thing, too, to discover the value of love this way [after loss] - when the object of love is no longer there, when love dies or goes away or changes. When it is too late.

We often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us.