Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.

TRUE TERROR IS TO WAKE UP ONE MORNING AND DISCOVER THAT YOUR HIGH SCHOOL CLASS IS RUNNING THE COUNTRY.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

It’s like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you’ve set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you’re watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

A novel has to limit itself to the crew of a ship or a family; it’s not a great way to process a huge number of people.

Don’t put anything in a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.