Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.
My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact.
The night sky in Egypt is a swirling mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them.
The first thing the Chinese ask you when they meet you is: 'How much money do you make?' It's a legitimate question to ask in China.
Political rights notwithstanding, 'freedom' rings awfully hollow when you're getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life.
[Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.
If you could stay at this stage - you're 17, and you're always going to be in love with your first love - that's probably attractive.
For some men, life seems to be one long attempt to escape childhood and all the fears of childhood. That's what many of us are doing.
When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.
I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.
Not one day of my mother's adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her.
If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.
Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science.
I've learned now to have a second title in reserve because, frequently, I come up with titles that seem to make editors' hair fall out.
Short chaps evolved naturally, but I didn't title and number them till much later. I like short chaps, like short books too, as a rule.
I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.
Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.
My writing circle isn't too full of people who fall into the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Tuesdays With Morrie" category.
Someday you will look back on all the awful stuff that's happening to you, and fondly smile. Doesn't say much about the future, does it?
A telemarketer has as much right to force people to listen to a sales pitch as a door-to-door salesman has to force himself into a home.
I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.
I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.
My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, 'We trust you, we believe in you.'
exercise will never be my lover. Or even my friend. For me, a workout is more like an annoying coworker I have to see a few times a week.
...with what we spent in Iraq we could build nuclear power plants and space solar power satellites and tell the Arabs to drink their oil.
My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.
Mary Stuart wrote, 'My end is in my beginning.' It is easier to agree with her than to decide what is the beginning, and what is the end.
I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.
The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that's about the time I started writing decent work.
Flower lifted a brow, dubious. 'You have to pay for a place to be dead in?' Moon shrugged. 'Sometimes, in cities. It’s a groundling thing.
I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way.
By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'
I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.
I've always been interested in the politics of war. War is one of those things that, the longer I studied it, the more illogical it seemed.
In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language.
In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That's a great way to freeze up.
I don't like to write about things that bore me, and that means I steer far clear of writing books that are just like what's on the shelves.
I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
Horror serves a cathartic role in human society, all throughout the world. It is a way of confronting the darkness, both within and without.
The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.
Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.
In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.
Marie Cornelie Falcon, who lost her voice while performing - singing the line 'Je suis pret' - 'I am ready.' How much more tragic can you get?
During my MFA, I was lucky to be surrounded by a really supportive group of peers. And now I get feedback pretty exclusively from freaks only.
If you're a beautiful Caucasian woman, and you commit a heinous crime, it's like people don't want to acknowledge the reality of your actions.
Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless.
More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.
The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.
Once you’ve read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.