We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know. ' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
Women need food, water, and compliments That's right. And an occasional pair of shoes.
People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.
The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields. . . : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.
When life is suddenly more serious more of the time, there is also more need for it to be fun at least some of the time. That's why my family will be at a college football game this weekend. We need it. And deserve it, too. Not like a New York fireman deserves it. Or a medic at the Pentagon. But enough.