You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent..

The rewriting is always crucial to what I do; whenever I do a scene, I always tell myself that this isn't final and that I can do it again, better. T….

People always ask me about the role models that I'm providing for kids, and I say I can't be concerned with that. I'm not worrying about corrupting y….

Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence..

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil..

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me..

Affection is one of the most neglected words in the English language, that people throw the word love around like confetti when they mean affection..

A novel must work as a story because no one's going to get to the other themes if you don't entertain the reader. But I like to have another layer of….

I don't mean to be insolent. I'm truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell….

I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something f….

When you get the ideas, that's a thrill; when you're writing the book and it's corning out well, that's a thrill; when you finish it and other people….

...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it..

We often think that tragedies happen because of great earthquakes in people's lives. I think they sometimes occur because of small things that become….

A man I know who writes and aspires to be a novelist does very little reading, and he's not that successful. But I think it's because he's like the k….

I don't like to think in terms of writing ten or twelve pages a day. Usually I'm writing a scene, and it's always with the idea, "I wonder what is go….

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not grea….

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea..

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the….

There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between ….

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing lan….

I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I re….