The heartland lies where the heart longs to be. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to find the true place to plant it.

Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.

I've just been bitten on the neck by a vampire... mosquito. Does that mean that when the night comes I will rise and be annoying?

Money is like fire. It is only good when there's just the right amount of it, when it's properly contained and under your control.

Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor. Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something. But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.

Of course at that point I had no idea that the adventure was only beginning and that the struggle and the rejections were to pile before me, a typical young writer, in an implacable mountain. But I was on my way.

If you ask me now, I think every single writer whose work I've read has had some influence upon me, and I continue to be influenced, subtly, by everything I read, like a sponge. But then, what writers aren't? Being a literary sponge is one of the prerequisites for this insanity.