Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.

Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.

At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".

I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.

Neither sugar nor salt tastes particularly good by itself. Each is at its best when used to season other things. Love is the same way. Use it to "season" people.