Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

Patience is not a virtue. It is an achievement.

Because without such a reprieve we cannot pause and regroup and with the newfound strength go on to initiate that very change which is sorely needed by all.

Respect the young and chastise your elders. It's about time the world was set aright.

The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.

What we need in fantasy is the sudden balm of clarity - a temporary reprieve from life's white noise and clamor of pain, a kind of time-out. Such clarity, a new perspective, is made possible by fantastic metaphor.

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.