“Stories are not about ideas, gimmicks, or places. Stories are about people. People are about feelings!”

About a year after (my stories began being published), magazine editor George Scithers, suggested to me that since I was so new at being published.

I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories.

There are a lot of aspiring writers out there who would like to know just that. Write that book.SFWW-I is that book. It’s the book I was looking for when I first started writing fiction.

The goal is not writing. The goal is being a human being writing.

As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape–fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life.

Every time I bomb out, I have to come back. I have a feeling after a bad race that my next one will be good.

Fear of feeling bad rarely makes one feel good.

There is a lovely warmness about feelings of nostalgia as though in one’s head one is putting on a pair of comfy old slippers and curling up in front of a fire.

You are in charge of your thoughts and feelings. If you are willing to search for the reason that you can’t let go of disturbing thoughts, you can learn about yourself and restore your own peace of mind.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

Muslims naturally saw Christendom as their arch rival. One point that is really important to bear in mind, particularly in addressing an American audience, and that is that the Islamic world has a very strong sense of history.

It’s always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they’re about eighteen years old. If you haven’t made your points with them by then, it’s too late.