Unless you're writing for a humorous effect, elves or space aliens and all creatures who aren't human should at least be as strange as, oh, the French.

Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

Politics is a dirty business, but if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you.

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.

It's always good to hear that people you like are happy.

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction.

Part of being a conscious human being, is having an intention. And if you put an intention into whatever you do, it’s definitely going to be more satisfying in the end

The fundamental characteristic that enables hidden leadership to bloom is demonstrating integrity.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

I want to be alone.

While you're pregnant you're made to feel not beautiful or sexually viable. You're either sexy, or you're a mother. I didn't want to have to choose, so I challenged that.

Ask Bill [Gates] why the string in [MS-DOS] function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that.

They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.

There are three levels of happiness: the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life.

It was considerably larger than a knife hilt.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.