Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now tha…

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that …

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his p…