Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

An enemy is like a man's most prized flower. It brings him joy to see it buried in the ground.

To love, and be loved, this is the greatest challenge that any of us face in our lives.

The names are bigger, the show is worldwide, but I get a royal pass into life in the broadcasting business.

New York, hands down. I don't want to be there in the winter, but even then it's an amazing place.

To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is to insult them without fear of consequences.

Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.

The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

Education today does not impart to the students the capacity or grit to face the challenges of daily life. The educational field has become the playing ground of ignorance.

Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.