Every hour you spend writing is an hour you don't spend worrying about your writing.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

Structure is translation software for your imagination.

Status, worry and comparison are ways to madness, not victory.

Superb historical romance, with a spiritual theme woven seamlessly throughout. I much enjoyed The Covered Deep and look forward to more from its author!

Think of it as the Doorway of No Return. The feeling must be that your lead character, once she passes through, cannot go home again until the major problem of the plot is solved.

Write like you're in love. Edit like you're in charge.

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

There's a perilous word fiction writers need to watch out for. The word is 'had.'

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

The thing I do at the beginning is a "voice journal," a free form doc that is the character speaking to me. I just work on it until I start to hear different from my own, or the other characters.

Creative thinking begins by embracing your naiveté and rejecting the obvious in favor of the unusual, the extraordinary, the evocative and or the new.

Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened.

Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sighted.

Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.

We live in an epoch in which the solid ground of our preconceived ideas shakes daily under our certain feet.

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.

I'm going to try to take a loving look at the situation and do what God gave me the ability to do, and He'll bless it.

Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Even though it felt completely natural - strangely enough - recording an album, I was very shy about making it public.