I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: 'Spider-Man,' 'Fantastic Four,' 'Captain America,' Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life.

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.